Aleksandar Hemon

Memory narrativises itself.

— Aleksandar Hemon

My skin was the border between the world and me.

— Aleksandar Hemon

“Home is where somebody notices your absence.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

“We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

“Shiny teeth were footnote to her smile.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

The balls do not make a writer.

— Aleksandar Hemon

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

— Aleksandar Hemon

“Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.

— Aleksandar Hemon

We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.

— Aleksandar Hemon

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— 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

Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.

— Aleksandar Hemon

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about…

— Aleksandar Hemon

When we're upset, our vocal cords tighten and we can't speak. And when I lie - well, I can't lie, because the…

— Aleksandar Hemon

I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive…

— Aleksandar Hemon

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.

— Aleksandar Hemon

“One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some…

— Aleksandar Hemon

The way I think of my work is that I have to think up the way to tell a story, starting from…

— Aleksandar Hemon

I really don't feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life,…

— Aleksandar Hemon

There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an…

— Aleksandar Hemon

I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is…

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

“She could slip out of her shoes and leave them right here, stuck in the muck, and then get rid of her…

— Aleksandar Hemon

“We know that laws ought to be obeyed only if they come out of people's sense of justice, not because the state…

— Aleksandar Hemon

Europe is a rapidly changing place, on every level. Immigration, post-communist transitions, the unification, steady presence of war and conflict, the inescapable…

— 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

“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

“One of the most common platitudes we heard was that “words failed.” But words were not failing us at all. It was…

— Aleksandar Hemon

“...while hiding in plain sight in Belgrade, undercover as a New Age mountebank, Karadžić frequented a bar called Mad House - Luda…

— Aleksandar Hemon

There has to be a kind of grassroots push, a movement, as it were, against the inherent isolationism of American capitalism as…

— Aleksandar Hemon

“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

“To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was…

— Aleksandar Hemon

“I do not know how old I was when I learned to play chess. I could not have been older than eight,…

— Aleksandar Hemon