I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
Europe is a rapidly changing place, on every level. Immigration, post-communist transitions, the unification, steady presence of war and conflict, the inescapable… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share 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… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
“The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically - and that to me is a privilege, to… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
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,… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
