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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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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Make
Island
People
Islands
Numbers
Came
Half
History
Ellis
Money
Roughly
Home
Returned

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.
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The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.
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You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.
Aleksandar Hemon
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My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.
Aleksandar Hemon
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The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I have a hard time imagining a country or a government where I would say, Oh, this is good, where I could live under a government that I respect for a day or a week, even to see what it feels like.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.
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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No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.
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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When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else - it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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