Quote

There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.

Aleksandar Hemon

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Thinking
Many
Argument
Sometimes
Becoming
Writing
Serious
Trying
Talk
Years
Point
Things
Words
Never
Write
Think
Running
Arguments

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

Image
Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you're not political because you don't do anything between elections.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn't stand them.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you're not, to think of it as sovereign because you're not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
The world is always greater than your desires plenty is never enough.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
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