Cvetanovic Aleksandar Quotes

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Joshua needed to eat something before embarking upon it, and hence stood in line behind an overtattooed prick who couldn't decide between banana and pumpkin bread, while the barista in a Che Guevara hat (yet presumably fluent in Middle fucking English) looked on indifferently. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

What would love be without mutually assured oblivion? ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

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

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

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. ~ 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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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? ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

Tell the fucking story. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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). ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

One person's garbage is another person's commodity. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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. ~ 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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Nobody reads poetry anymore
So who the hell are you
I see bent over this book? ~ Aleksandar Ristovic

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 ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

We are within our life and we stay there for as long as possible, that's our home. We need life. There is too much death already, and there is probably more coming our way. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

Isabel's indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow. ~ Aleksandar Hemon