Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I had an epiphany: I was a loser.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?

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

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.

Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.

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.

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

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.

An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.

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

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.

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.

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

Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.

I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.

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.

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.

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

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.