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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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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Left
Reflect
Stories
Provide
Even
Tried
Build
Personality
Extinguish
Perhaps
Negation
Story
Cathedrals
Lives
Bricks

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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God knows our despair. God wants His chosen people to live in peace. God loves life, cares less about death. We need to live. I want to live, I want my children to live. Everyone I know wants to live. You have to ask yourself what is more important to you, life is death. What is this world about - life or death?
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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I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.
Aleksandar Hemon
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New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.
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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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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If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.
Aleksandar Hemon
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When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.
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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To write has to be related to a drive inside.
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.
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'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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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
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There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.
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