“If you wait long enough, something will happen - there has never been a time when nothing happened.” — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
One builds one's life in consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap,… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I have a hard time imagining a country or a government where I would say, "Oh, this is good," where I could… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“What you see is what you see, but that is never everything. Sarajavo is Sarajevo whatever you see or don't see. America… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“But the moment you point at a difference, you enter, regardless of age, an already existing system of differences, a network of… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a different place,… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“This took place just before the war, in the relatively rosz times, when we were euphoric with the imminence of disaster –… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“Mujo is a refugee in Germany, has no job, but has a lot of time, so he goes to a Turkish bath.… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“There’s a psychological mechanism, I’ve come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have… — 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
