What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
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
“Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is… — 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
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
The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
There's a social and human necessity for some kind of continuity, but it's not axiomatic and not something you're born into; it's… — 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
