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.

Aleksandar Hemon

Categorized in : War Challenges Literature

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

Aleksandar Hemon

deep-thought understanding home

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

died i-loved-you married

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

Aleksandar Hemon

nowhere-to-go home world

I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.

Aleksandar Hemon

inspiration writing believe

One builds one's life in consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.

Aleksandar Hemon

flower reality past

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Aleksandar Hemon

borscht should perfect

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

Aleksandar Hemon

piano sky fall

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

space book ideas

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

effort real silly

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

Aleksandar Hemon

delusion sibling belief

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

Aleksandar Hemon

losing winning thinking

Europe has never been a monolithic space, it contains a lot of people, a lot of languages and infinite supplies of history. I didn't need to do anything to showcase diversity. It is a condition of life and art in Europe, contained in every random sample.

Aleksandar Hemon

diversity people art

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

Aleksandar Hemon

geography soul cities

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.

Aleksandar Hemon

used looks thinking

Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?

Aleksandar Hemon

leaving-me woods lord

There has to be a kind of grassroots push, a movement, as it were, against the inherent isolationism of American capitalism as practiced in the publishing industry. There need to be grants and government support and a few publishers, mainstream and independent, who are not afraid to challenge American readership. We need to build a network of translators, publishers and readers. We hope that our annual anthology might provide an upsurge in interest for European fiction and then, as we publish it every year, become a habit to many readers.

Aleksandar Hemon

support independent challenges

I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself.

Aleksandar Hemon

meditating know-how moments

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.

Aleksandar Hemon

parent home two

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

Aleksandar Hemon

neurosurgeons doubt brain

The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.

Aleksandar Hemon

funny-things differences views