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I'm not nervous if I think about something for nine years and then I don't write it. Even if it fades it doesn't concern me. It'll come back if it's worth it.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Thinking
Doesn
Back
Come
Fades
Writing
Nervous
Even
Nine
Something
Concern
Years
Worth
Think
Write

More quotes by 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 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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Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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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Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
Aleksandar Hemon
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There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.
Aleksandar Hemon
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My skin was the border between the world and me.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I actually didn't listen to the Beatles song 'Nowhere Man' when I was writing my book of the same name. What I listened to a lot was 'Abbey Road.' Its disjointedness and its readiness to confuse only to delight were inspiring to me.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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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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