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 More Quotes by Aleksandar Hemon More Quotes From 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 junk socialism privacy My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness. Aleksandar Hemon car sadness country 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 labels sadness pain 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. Aleksandar Hemon knows people world I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn't stand them. Aleksandar Hemon appreciate different literature Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend. Aleksandar Hemon legends fantasy memories Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity Aleksandar Hemon pity self talking 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. Aleksandar Hemon important writing school 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. Aleksandar Hemon agency writing world The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity. Aleksandar Hemon fantasy reality people We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred. Aleksandar Hemon form hatred self I actually didn't listen to the Beatles song 'Nowhere Man' when I was writing my book of the same name. What I listened to a lot was 'Abbey Road.' Its disjointedness and its readiness to confuse only to delight were inspiring to me. Aleksandar Hemon writing song book I had an epiphany: I was a loser. Aleksandar Hemon epiphany loser 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. Aleksandar Hemon pain character past 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 decision numbers moving 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 existence care waiting The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less. Aleksandar Hemon loses matter lost An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position. Aleksandar Hemon unjust political world 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 call-me novelists kind I dont make notes for myself because I either lose them or they make no sense to me at all. I once found a piece of paper with the note: everything. Apparently I made a note to myself not to forget everything! Aleksandar Hemon forget-everything pieces paper
