Aleksandar Hemon quotes

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings. (Aleksandar Hemon)
Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not. View quote
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 all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
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. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
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. (Aleksandar Hemon)
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. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
Memory narrativises itself. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself. View quote
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 for creativity. (Aleksandar Hemon)
I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that. View quote
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 day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon