“...-not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can… — 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
I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“One of the most common platitudes we heard was that “words failed.” But words were not failing us at all. It was… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Europe has never been a monolithic space, it contains a lot of people, a lot of languages and infinite supplies of history.… — 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 Image
To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
