Quote

What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.

Aleksandar Hemon

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Imports
Tend
Aspect
Demand
Moral
Political
Didactic
Even
Import
Shun

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

Image
If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, What do you do when you're not writing? And I said, I idle.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you're not, to think of it as sovereign because you're not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you're not political because you don't do anything between elections.
Aleksandar Hemon