Aleksandar Hemon
Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.Collection: Ethics
Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.Collection: Writing
I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn't stand them.Collection: Appreciate
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.Collection: Political
As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.Collection: Long
It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.Collection: War
I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.Collection: Envy
Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.Collection: Artist
The balls do not make a writer.Collection: Balls
I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.Collection: Art
Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.Collection: Stories
Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.Collection: Thinking
For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).Collection: Writing
Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.Collection: Art
Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.Collection: Book
To me, the solidarity of readers is far more important than the solidarity of writers, particularly since readers in fact find ways to connect over a book or books, whatever they may be.Collection: Book
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, to think of it as sovereign because you're not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be.Collection: Thinking
What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.Collection: Space
Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.Collection: Self
There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.Collection: Book
Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.Collection: Sometimes
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 doesn't seem that bad.Collection: Laziness
We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.Collection: Self
I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.Collection: Home
Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.Collection: Hands
Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.Collection: Simplicity
We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.Collection: Order
God knows our despair. God wants His chosen people to live in peace. God loves life, cares less about death. We need to live. I want to live, I want my children to live. Everyone I know wants to live. You have to ask yourself what is more important to you, life is death. What is this world about - life or death?Collection: Children
For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house it was to salvage photos.Collection: Running
If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.Collection: Finding Yourself
I dont make notes for myself because I either lose them or they make no sense to me at all. I once found a piece of paper with the note: everything. Apparently I made a note to myself not to forget everything!Collection: Forget Everything
Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.Collection: Personality
When I was in high school, I was in a special math class. I was infatuated with physics, particularly nuclear physics, Einstein, and the Big Bang. I read a lot about black holes. And partly because I'm so lazy I thought you could do all this just by looking at the sky and thinking up universes. It didn't seem like hard work when I was a kid, so I enrolled in this class.Collection: School
The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.Collection: Roots
It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.Collection: Thinking
If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.Collection: Order
There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.Collection: Character
There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be.Collection: Crazy
People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.Collection: People
There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.Collection: Art
I think it's interesting, from a creative point of view, to have witnessed the loss of consciousness on a national level and on a cultural level - Bush had 91 percent support in the polls after 9/11. We wanted to kick some ass!Collection: Loss
To write has to be related to a drive inside.Collection: Writing
Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.Collection: Domain
Outsider means "I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain."Collection: Responsibility
I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.Collection: Hate
No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.Collection: Writing
It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.Collection: Clear
Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.Collection: Space
When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism.Collection: Junk