Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

If you find yourself asking: How did I get here? Isador once said, that probably means you are living a life worth living.

You have to create a form from the life that exists, not the other way around. If it comes out in these little pieces, that's what it is.

Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.

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.

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.

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.

People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.

Outsider means "I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain."

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.

I think our refusal to read {some} novels exactly corresponds with..our refusal to confront inconvenient facts of a changing world and our moral culpability in what our government has done in our name . . . While more novels are read than ever before--those are escapist novels--so as to forget what we need to remember.

If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.

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.

Men confide, lust rhetorically, copulate hypothetically with women of unacknowledged fantasy.

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.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

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.

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.

Then everyone would retreat for a nap, after which we would have coffee and cake, sometimes an argument.

Before the war, the domain of culture seemed to offer a haven from the increasingly hateful world of politics. Now, when I hear the word culture, I pull out the quote commonly attributed to Hermann Goring: When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.

Her hot attire did not signify promiscuity - contrary to the consensual interpretation of the other male teachers - but a kind of nostalgia: this was what she used to wear when she was happy, when she used to live the normal

Let me tell you a joke, Rora said.
Mujo wakes up one day, after a long night of drinking, and asks himself what the meaning of life is. He goes to work, but realizes that is not what life is or should be. He decides to read some philosophy and for years studies everything from the old Greeks onward, but can't find the meaning of life. Maybe it's the family, he thinks, so he spends time with his wife, Fata, and the kids, but finds no meaning in that and so he leaves them. He thinks, Maybe helping others is the meaning of life, so he goes to medical school, graduates with flying colors, goes to Africa to cure malaria and transplants hearts, but cannot discover the meaning of life. He thinks, maybe it's the wealth, so he becomes a businessman, starts making money hand over fist, millions of dollars, buys everything there is to buy, but that is not what life is about. Then he turns to poverty and humility and such, so he gives everything away and begs on the streets, but still he cannot see what life is. He thinks maybe it is literature: he writes novel upon novel, but the more he writes the more obscure the meaning of life becomes. He turns to God, lives the life of a dervish, reads and contemplates the Holy Book of Islam - still, nothing. He studies Christianity, then Judaism, then Buddhism, then everything else - no meaning of life there. Finally, he hears about a guru living high up in the mountains somewhere in the East. The guru, they say, knows what the meaning of lif

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.

I really don't feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life, and actually I have nothing to confess and I certainly do not ask for redemption and there is no reward for confessing that I expect.

History: the first time a joke, the second time a badly translated joke.

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.

If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.

New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.

I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

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.

Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.

Anything that might come under arts should not be subject to the whims of the idiotic market because the market's stupid, and it gravitates toward simplicity - towards essentializing things so they can be sold.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

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

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

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.

He drunkenly recognized that the lust was part of something bigger, of a craving to pursue pleasure unreasonably, beyond the right and wrong, to go as far as his body took him. In the body there is no absolute, or free, will, but the body is determined to desire this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity.

Was. He wasn't so much jealous as he wanted Kimiko to confess that she experienced lust independent of him - the thought of her sovereign lechery turned him on, because it frightened him.

-not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn't matter.

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.

You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you write better, and it shouldn't make you write worse, either.

People here snarl and frown a lot, he wrote; he had seen neither a smile nor the sun in months. What is life without beauty, love, and justice?

Man reaches a point in his life when unchanging becomes a matter of pride; the habits and remnants of youth are thereafter kept in the museum of the self.

An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.

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.

She was beautiful; my breath was taken; we were still lonely; she said yes.

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

Do you hear that, Dillon? Inadvertent self-wedgie! Write that down! That's what you want your characters to say, not some anodyne bullshit about corporate greed.

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.

When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

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.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

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.

All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.

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.

It must be taking enormous energy to do her Janet-did-it-again shtick every day; no wonder she was so worn out.

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.

Perhaps if they all remained silent for as long as possible, they'd slip out of this moment into the next one, and then the next one, until all the preceding moments were erased from memory and everything could start all over again. The ultimate American dream: the eternal present, where nothing has ever happened before what is happening now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The cafeteria in the Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world - and forever it shall be - with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.

What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.

All the players looked absurdly inept, as though they were expressly drafted to be humiliated, entrepreneurs in the industry of losing.

I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

He acquired the unknowable, variable depths; he could be anyone he wanted to be, and if he didn't like who he became, he could switch again, going in, going out. And who the fuck are you?

You've never been married, so you don't know, but it is a fragile thing. Nothing ever goes away, everything stays inside it. It is a different reality.

I deigned to suggest to him that it was also the American thing
America was nothing if not good intentions.

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

But the moment you point at a difference, you enter, regardless of age, an already existing system of differences, a network of identities, all of them ultimately arbitrary and unrelated to your intentions, none of them a matter of your choice. The moment you other someone, you other yourself. When I idiotically pointed at Almir's non-existent difference, I expelled myself from my raja.

To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn't matter. One had to protect from the onslaught of wasted words the silent place deep inside oneself, where all the pieces could be arranged in a logical manner, where the opponents abided by the rules, where even if you ran out of possibilities there might be a way to turn defeat into victory.

I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.

So you are Catholic? Didn't know that.
I am nothing, I said. God knows God is no friend of mine. But I envy people who believe in this crap. They don't worry about the meaning of life and things, whereas I do.

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.

Let me tell you a joke, Rora said.
Mujo and his wife, Fata, are in bed. It's late at night. Mujo is falling asleep, and Fata is watching porn: a horny couple, all silicone and tattoos, is sucking and fucking like there is no tomorrow. Mujo says, C'mon, Fata, turn that off, let's go to sleep. And Fata says, Let me just see if these kids are going to get married in the end.

We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.

What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.

I told her I hated normal people and the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave, and I hated God and George and all and everything.

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.

The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.

What would love be without mutually assured oblivion?

Mujo is a refugee in Germany, has no job, but has a lot of time, so he goes to a Turkish bath. The bath is full of German businessmen with towels around their waists, huffing and puffing, but every once in a while a cell phone rings and they pull their phone out from under the towel and say, Bitte? Mujo seems to be the only one without a cell phone, so he goes to the bathroom and stuffs toilet paper up his butt. He walks back out, a long trail of toilet paper behind him. So a German says, you have some paper, Herr, sticking out behind you. Oh, Mujo says, it looks like I have received a fax.

I like the idea of a book being a democratic space which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate in a conversation, or experience of grace.

Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.

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

Right now, it didn't look good, the life. What doesn't kill you makes you horny.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

I wish I could avoid the people who have threatened me. My favorite threat is that I will be thrown in the River Miljacka, which is at most knee-deep, with my feet bound in cement.

But nothing has ever been - nor will it ever be - the way it used to be.

The implicit requirements of the committed relationship Joshua was pursuing with Kimiko assumed spending Saturday nights together for the purposes of intimacy.

We know that laws ought to be obeyed only if they come out of people's sense of justice, not because the state needs them to preserve its power. Laws devised for the depravity of power are as worthless as the paper they are printed on.

Don't you wonder sometimes," sang Bowie all the way to Kinshasa, "about sound and vision?

Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?

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.

Let me tell you what the problem is, Brik. Even if you knew what you want to know, you would still know nothing. You ask questions, you want to know more, but no matter how much more I tell you, you will never know anything. That's the problem.