Words matter. These are the best Aleksandar Hemon Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you write better, and it shouldn’t make you write worse, either.
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.
In Bosnian, there’s no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there’s no word describing that.
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.
A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I’m writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.
I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.
I long for, not a writer’s retreat – I can write in any situation – but a reader’s retreat.
I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I’m confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.
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.
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.
New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
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.
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.
I did not intend to stay; I had no experience in the United States – I may have been here less than 24 hours – but I knew I would never get inside there. And ‘there’ not being America necessarily, but that harmonious mode of living that some people are lucky enough to have in this country.
I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
I really don’t feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life, and actually I have nothing to confess and I certainly do not ask for redemption and there is no reward for confessing that I expect.
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.
Memory narrativises itself.
The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it’s not like I’m writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it ‘a novel,’ it separates it from other books.
