Quote

Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Familiar
Mental
Activates
Comfortable
Revert
Seem
Activate
Already
Clich
Sort
Laziness
Doesn
Domain
Seems
Imagined

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.
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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.
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Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.
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I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.
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I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world it allows for creativity.
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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There's no bad writing you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.
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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 resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.
Aleksandar Hemon
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An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision, to bond in being confounded.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.
Aleksandar Hemon
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The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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.
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I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.
Aleksandar Hemon