Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

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

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Control

• The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Lose

• You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you write better, and it shouldn’t make you write worse, either.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Praise, Either

• When we’re upset, our vocal cords tighten and we can’t speak. And when I lie – well, I can’t lie, because the same thing happens – everyone who knows me knows that when I start squeaking, I’ve started lying.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Upset, Lying

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Refined, Bourgeois

• The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it’s not like I’m writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it ‘a novel,’ it separates it from other books.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Novel, Continuity

• I wish I could avoid the people who have threatened me. My favorite threat is that I will be thrown in the River Miljacka, which is at most knee-deep, with my feet bound in cement.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Avoid, Threatened

• I really don’t feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life, and actually I have nothing to confess and I certainly do not ask for redemption and there is no reward for confessing that I expect.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Wrote, Redemption

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Literary, Twain

• I don’t 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Notes, Forget

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Wait, Existence

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Stay, Intend

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Delight, Listened

• A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I’m writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Piece, Every Day

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writer, Choice

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Sorrow, Creativity

• When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival – it was a means of thought resuscitation.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Full, Swing

• To me there’s no difference between a book of stories and a novel – they’re just slightly different shapes.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Stories, Novel

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Approaching, Showing

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

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Publishing, Stars

Aleksandar Hemon (40)

Birth:	9th September, 1964
Nationality:	American, Bosnian
Profession:	Essayist, Novelist, Writer

About

Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian American fiction writer, essayist, and critic. He has written five books: The Book of My Lives; Love and Obstacles: Stories; The Lazarus Project: A Novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Awards, and was named as a New York Times Notable Book and New York magazine's No. 1 Book of the Year; Nowhere Man, also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Question of Bruno: Stories.

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Today's Anniversary - 24th April

Births

• 1969 - Renee Zellweger
• 1974 - Derek Luke
• 1916 - Lou Thesz
• 1973 - Lee Westwood
• 1969 - Melinda Clarke

Deaths

• 2011 - Sri Sathya Sai Baba
• 1976 - Mark Tobey
• 1980 - Alejo Carpentier
• 1942 - Lucy Maud Montgomery
• 1993 - Oliver Tambo