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There's no bad writing you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Something
Operating
Ashamed
Inside
Language
Writing

More quotes by 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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The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.
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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My skin was the border between the world and me.
Aleksandar Hemon
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You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Memory narrativises itself.
Aleksandar Hemon
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One builds one's life in consistency one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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
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The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.
Aleksandar Hemon
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As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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'm bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I'm better than them.
Aleksandar Hemon
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When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.
Aleksandar Hemon
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It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
Aleksandar Hemon