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Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Come
Must
Writing
Rilke
Necessity
Inner
Write
Art
Cannot

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.
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What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.
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Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.
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If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.
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Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.
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I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.
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There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.
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In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction there's no word describing that.
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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.
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The people who listened to rock 'n' roll, I thought, were bound together against the people who didn't listen to rock 'n' roll. That, of course, didn't work at all. Your taste in rock 'n' roll does not say anything about you, morally or otherwise.
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Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?
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I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn't stand them.
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A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.
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The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.
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Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I think about the story while I think about other things. This is an important part of the process: I look at it sideways. If I look straight at it, it produces nothing other than what seem like complicated, brilliant designs that fall apart the following morning. In some way stories mature when you're not looking.
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When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.
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.
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I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility.
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