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Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
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More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon
For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house it was to salvage photos.
Aleksandar Hemon
We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.
Aleksandar Hemon
I don't like having a teaching job - office hours and conferences and committees and bosses and all that - but I tend to enjoy teaching, and I design the course in such a way that there'll be pleasure in that.
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
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 know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically - and that to me is a privilege, to me as a person but also a writer. I've dined with billionaires, and I play soccer with busboys.
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
I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.
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
I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.
Aleksandar Hemon
I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.
Aleksandar Hemon
The world is always greater than your desires plenty is never enough.
Aleksandar Hemon
I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.
Aleksandar Hemon
You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
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
There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be.
Aleksandar Hemon
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