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For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Involved
Relations
Least
Demands
Literature
Productive
Fighting
Relation
Upon
Private
Writers
Individual
Demand
Network
Different
Fight
Relevant
Writing

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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We hated pretentiousness it was a form of self-hatred.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else - it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that.
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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One of the many conditions that have to be met for a brain to become a mind, and therefore have consciousness, is 'the analog I' around which all the simultaneous inflow of sensations and stimulations are reflected and organized.
Aleksandar Hemon
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There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
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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Anything that might come under arts should not be subject to the whims of the idiotic market because the market's stupid, and it gravitates toward simplicity - towards essentializing things so they can be sold.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.
Aleksandar Hemon
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God knows our despair. God wants His chosen people to live in peace. God loves life, cares less about death. We need to live. I want to live, I want my children to live. Everyone I know wants to live. You have to ask yourself what is more important to you, life is death. What is this world about - life or death?
Aleksandar Hemon
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Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.
Aleksandar Hemon
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It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?
Aleksandar Hemon
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Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.
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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We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.
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.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
Aleksandar Hemon