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I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Indeed
Language
Means
Scars
Left
Contain
Book
Scar
Mean
Engagement
Writing
World
Main

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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Europe is a rapidly changing place, on every level. Immigration, post-communist transitions, the unification, steady presence of war and conflict, the inescapable challenges to the notion of national literature/culture-it all exerts pressure upon writers who must be aware of the transformational possibilities of the situation.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I dont make notes for myself because I either lose them or they make no sense to me at all. I once found a piece of paper with the note: everything. Apparently I made a note to myself not to forget everything!
Aleksandar Hemon
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In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction there's no word describing that.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.
Aleksandar Hemon
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The world is always greater than your desires plenty is never enough.
Aleksandar Hemon
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What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?
Aleksandar Hemon
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It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.
Aleksandar Hemon
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No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.
Aleksandar Hemon
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The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.
Aleksandar Hemon
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New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.
Aleksandar Hemon
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If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.
Aleksandar Hemon
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There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.
Aleksandar Hemon
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In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.
Aleksandar Hemon