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My books have been published all over Europe. They read me there, and I want to read them back. I also spend a lot of time in Europe, often meeting writers, and I'm sick of apologizing for the embarrassing shortage of translations in America.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Book
Europe
Translations
Time
Spend
Apologizing
Books
Published
Read
Embarrassing
Often
Meeting
Also
Meetings
America
Writers
Back
Sick
Shortage

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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One of the many conditions that have to be met for a brain to become a mind, and therefore have consciousness, is 'the analog I' around which all the simultaneous inflow of sensations and stimulations are reflected and organized.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.
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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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've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.
Aleksandar Hemon
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People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.
Aleksandar Hemon
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There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it's worth putting up a fight.
Aleksandar Hemon
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It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.
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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If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.
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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Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.
Aleksandar Hemon
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The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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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Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, What do you do when you're not writing? And I said, I idle.
Aleksandar Hemon