“There’s a psychological mechanism, I’ve come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live, as it would be unbearably obvious… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share
There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we… — 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
The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.” — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
One of the many conditions that have to be met for a brain to become a mind, and therefore have consciousness, is… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working… — 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
