Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else - it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
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 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 pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important. — 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 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
