110+ Aleksandar Hemon Quotes On Friendship, Knowledge And Creative

Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American writer and essayist. He is best known for his 2003 novel The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also written several short stories and non-fiction works, and has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Aleksandar Hemon on love, friendship, knowledge.

Top 10 Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

1. 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.
2. Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
3. I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.
4. 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.
5. I had an epiphany: I was a loser.
6. 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.
7. New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
8. Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?
9. We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.
• There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.
• People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.
• I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.
• If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.
• I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.
• An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.
• We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.
• Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.
• I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.

Aleksandar Hemon Quotes About Love

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

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'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

Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love. — Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example. — 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

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

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

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans. — 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 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

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

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

I think it's interesting, from a creative point of view, to have witnessed the loss of consciousness on a national level and on a cultural level - Bush had 91 percent support in the polls after 9/11. We wanted to kick some ass! — Aleksandar Hemon

When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature. — Aleksandar Hemon

I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat. — 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

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

To write has to be related to a drive inside. — Aleksandar Hemon

Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else - it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that. — Aleksandar Hemon

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements. — Aleksandar Hemon

Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity — Aleksandar Hemon

I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility. — Aleksandar Hemon

I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that's the center. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

I think about the story while I think about other things. This is an important part of the process: I look at it sideways. If I look straight at it, it produces nothing other than what seem like complicated, brilliant designs that fall apart the following morning. In some way stories mature when you're not looking. — Aleksandar Hemon

It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time. — Aleksandar Hemon

Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it. — 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

The way I think of my work is that I have to think up the way to tell a story, starting from scratch. The changes in the industry concern me in a general way because I think civilization is doomed. — Aleksandar Hemon

I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world. — Aleksandar Hemon

It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is. — 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've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

One of the many conditions that have to be met for a brain to become a mind, and therefore have consciousness, is 'the analog I' around which all the simultaneous inflow of sensations and stimulations are reflected and organized. — Aleksandar Hemon

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it. — Aleksandar Hemon

I don't think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done. — 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

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write. — 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

Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever. — Aleksandar Hemon

You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language. — Aleksandar Hemon

We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life. — 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. — 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

There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf. — 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

Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art. — 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. — Aleksandar Hemon

The balls do not make a writer. — Aleksandar Hemon

My skin was the border between the world and me. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

The people who listened to rock 'n' roll, I thought, were bound together against the people who didn't listen to rock 'n' roll. That, of course, didn't work at all. Your taste in rock 'n' roll does not say anything about you, morally or otherwise. — Aleksandar Hemon

I've never had a stupid student in my life. I never look down on my students. I never thought, "Look at these people." I might argue with them and I think that some of them might have misconceptions - that they might be infected by the intellectual laziness that is the foundation of American popular culture, and of capitalism, if you wish. But part of my job as a teacher is to work with that - against that. — Aleksandar Hemon

I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me. — Aleksandar Hemon

Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough. — 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

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

I did not intend to stay; I had no experience in the United States - I may have been here less than 24 hours - but I knew I would never get inside there. And 'there' not being America necessarily, but that harmonious mode of living that some people are lucky enough to have in this country. — Aleksandar Hemon

It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there. — Aleksandar Hemon

You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly. — Aleksandar Hemon

It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories. — Aleksandar Hemon

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is. — Aleksandar Hemon

Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle." — Aleksandar Hemon

Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity. — Aleksandar Hemon

Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere? — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible. — Aleksandar Hemon

Life Lessons by Aleksandar Hemon

1. Aleksandar Hemon's work emphasizes the importance of writing from a personal and unique perspective, as well as the power of storytelling to create meaningful connections between people.
2. He also encourages readers to explore the complexities of identity, and to consider how our cultural backgrounds shape our experiences.
3. Through his writing, Hemon encourages readers to embrace their own individual stories and to recognize the value of diverse perspectives.