Aleksandar Hemon
I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.Collection: Artist
What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.Collection: Art
We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.Collection: Crazy
There's a social and human necessity for some kind of continuity, but it's not axiomatic and not something you're born into; it's something you have to work at. And one of the ways to work at it - perhaps the best - is storytelling: telling stories about yourself to others, telling stories about yourself to yourself, telling stories about others to others.Collection: Telling Stories
You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that.Collection: Diversity
Europe is a rapidly changing place, on every level. Immigration, post-communist transitions, the unification, steady presence of war and conflict, the inescapable challenges to the notion of national literature/culture-it all exerts pressure upon writers who must be aware of the transformational possibilities of the situation.Collection: War
I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility.Collection: Art
I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.Collection: Believe
My books have been published all over Europe. They read me there, and I want to read them back. I also spend a lot of time in Europe, often meeting writers, and I'm sick of apologizing for the embarrassing shortage of translations in America.Collection: Book
Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.Collection: Art
You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.Collection: Thinking
One of the many conditions that have to be met for a brain to become a mind, and therefore have consciousness, is 'the analog I' around which all the simultaneous inflow of sensations and stimulations are reflected and organized.Collection: Mind
What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.Collection: America
I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.Collection: Country
I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that's the center.Collection: Jobs
There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.Collection: Running
I think about the story while I think about other things. This is an important part of the process: I look at it sideways. If I look straight at it, it produces nothing other than what seem like complicated, brilliant designs that fall apart the following morning. In some way stories mature when you're not looking.Collection: Morning
I don't like having a teaching job - office hours and conferences and committees and bosses and all that - but I tend to enjoy teaching, and I design the course in such a way that there'll be pleasure in that.Collection: Jobs
In some way there is no real life. It’s always the story of your life that you’re living.Collection: Stories
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: Stories
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