Aleksandar Hemon
You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.Collection: Style
Europe has never been a monolithic space, it contains a lot of people, a lot of languages and infinite supplies of history. I didn't need to do anything to showcase diversity. It is a condition of life and art in Europe, contained in every random sample.Collection: Art
The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.Collection: Differences
I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.Collection: Winning
The way I think of my work is that I have to think up the way to tell a story, starting from scratch. The changes in the industry concern me in a general way because I think civilization is doomed.Collection: Thinking
Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pityCollection: Self
I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision, to bond in being confounded.Collection: Moving
There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it's worth putting up a fight.Collection: Struggle
The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.Collection: Matter
I had an epiphany: I was a loser.Collection: Loser
I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.Collection: Daughter
It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life.Collection: Pain
The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.Collection: Spring
If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.Collection: Political
We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.Collection: Light
Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.Collection: Deserve
I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.Collection: World
Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you're not political because you don't do anything between elections.Collection: Thinking
It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.Collection: Distance
Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.Collection: Forever
I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible.Collection: Long
Every writer owes something to a particular tradition he/she grew up in. But no serious writer - other than the militantly nationalist ones - would reduce his/her domain of influence to a single tradition. Furthermore, historical breaks are so common and large in Europe that there are ruptures in every tradition which then connect the same generations across national borders. Younger Eastern European writers, for instance, have more in common with other writers of the same age in Europe, than with the previous, communist-era generations in their own countries.Collection: Country
My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.Collection: Country
I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.Collection: Pain
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.Collection: People
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.Collection: Memories
Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?Collection: Deeper
An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.Collection: Political
The people who listened to rock 'n' roll, I thought, were bound together against the people who didn't listen to rock 'n' roll. That, of course, didn't work at all. Your taste in rock 'n' roll does not say anything about you, morally or otherwise.Collection: Rocks
The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity.Collection: Reality
The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.Collection: Contentment
I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically - and that to me is a privilege, to me as a person but also a writer. I've dined with billionaires, and I play soccer with busboys.Collection: Soccer
I'm not nervous if I think about something for nine years and then I don't write it. Even if it fades it doesn't concern me. It'll come back if it's worth it.Collection: Writing
I've never had a stupid student in my life. I never look down on my students. I never thought, "Look at these people." I might argue with them and I think that some of them might have misconceptions - that they might be infected by the intellectual laziness that is the foundation of American popular culture, and of capitalism, if you wish. But part of my job as a teacher is to work with that - against that.Collection: Teacher
I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.Collection: Expectations
The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.Collection: Writing
I'm bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I'm better than them.Collection: Thinking
I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.Collection: Waiting
I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself.Collection: Moments
You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.Collection: Doubt
I have a hard time imagining a country or a government where I would say, "Oh, this is good," where I could live under a government that I respect for a day or a week, even to see what it feels like.Collection: Country
There has to be a kind of grassroots push, a movement, as it were, against the inherent isolationism of American capitalism as practiced in the publishing industry. There need to be grants and government support and a few publishers, mainstream and independent, who are not afraid to challenge American readership. We need to build a network of translators, publishers and readers. We hope that our annual anthology might provide an upsurge in interest for European fiction and then, as we publish it every year, become a habit to many readers.Collection: Independent
In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example.Collection: Sorry
Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.Collection: Educational
It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.Collection: Eight
Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.Collection: World
Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."Collection: Writing
I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.Collection: Soccer
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 all the time.Collection: Mind