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Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Cities
Riot
Public
Spaces
Space
Encouraged
History
Partly
Also
Racial
Together
Prevent
Segregate
People
Chicago
Riots
City
Segregation
More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon
I wish I could avoid the people who have threatened me. My favorite threat is that I will be thrown in the River Miljacka, which is at most knee-deep, with my feet bound in cement.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that.
Aleksandar Hemon
I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
We hated pretentiousness it was a form of self-hatred.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
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
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.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
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
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
The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that's the center.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
