I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction. — 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
A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write. — 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
No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I actually didn't listen to the Beatles song 'Nowhere Man' when I was writing my book of the same name. What I… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in… — 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
