Aleksandar Hemon

Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our…

— Aleksandar Hemon

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?

— Aleksandar Hemon

I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so…

— Aleksandar Hemon

“The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating…

— Aleksandar Hemon

I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically - and that to me is a…

— Aleksandar Hemon

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for…

— Aleksandar Hemon

I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started…

— Aleksandar Hemon

It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to…

— Aleksandar Hemon

I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where…

— Aleksandar Hemon

There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters…

— Aleksandar Hemon

I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

— Aleksandar Hemon

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Memory narrativises itself.

— Aleksandar Hemon

“If you wait long enough, something will happen - there has never been a time when nothing happened.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this…

— Aleksandar Hemon

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows…

— Aleksandar Hemon

I don't think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done.

— Aleksandar Hemon

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as…

— Aleksandar Hemon

To me, the solidarity of readers is far more important than the solidarity of writers, particularly since readers in fact find ways…

— Aleksandar Hemon

“...-not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in…

— Aleksandar Hemon

Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you're not political because you don't…

— Aleksandar Hemon

“Much like Ella, I'd found myself with an excess of words, the wealth of which far exceeded the pathetic limits of my…

— Aleksandar Hemon

There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and…

— Aleksandar Hemon