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I like the idea of a book being a democratic space which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate in a conversation, or experience of grace.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Like
Reader
Thoughts
Grace
Participate
Space
Carrying
Idea
Readers
Experience
Enter
Ideas
Democratic
Book
Conversation

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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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
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It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.
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've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.
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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There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.
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
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I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Europe has never been a monolithic space, it contains a lot of people, a lot of languages and infinite supplies of history. I didn't need to do anything to showcase diversity. It is a condition of life and art in Europe, contained in every random sample.
Aleksandar Hemon
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We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.
Aleksandar Hemon
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In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.
Aleksandar Hemon
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To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.
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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Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.
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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If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.
Aleksandar Hemon