Aleksandar Hemon quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

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.

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

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.

Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.

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.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

Tell the fucking story.

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."

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."

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

But the moment you point at a difference, you enter, regardless of age, an already existing system of differences, a network of identities, all of them ultimately arbitrary and unrelated to your intentions, none of them a matter of your choice. The moment you other someone, you other yourself. When I idiotically pointed at Almir's non-existent difference, I expelled myself from my raja."

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.

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.

God knows our despair. God wants His chosen people to live in peace. God loves life, cares less about death. We need to live. I want to live, I want my children to live. Everyone I know wants to live. You have to ask yourself what is more important to you, life is death. What is this world about - life or death?

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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

People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.

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.

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

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.

I told her I hated normal people and the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave, and I hated God and George and all and everything.

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

Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

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

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.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had an epiphany: I was a loser.

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.

Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.

My skin was the border between the world and me.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?

We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.

You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.

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.

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

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

The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.

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.

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

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

When I was in high school, I was in a special math class. I was infatuated with physics, particularly nuclear physics, Einstein, and the Big Bang. I read a lot about black holes. And partly because I'm so lazy I thought you could do all this just by looking at the sky and thinking up universes. It didn't seem like hard work when I was a kid, so I enrolled in this class.

Memory narrativises itself.

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.

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."

I don't like having a teaching job - office hours and conferences and committees and bosses and all that - but I tend to enjoy teaching, and I design the course in such a way that there'll be pleasure in that.

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.

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!

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

If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.

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

I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.

What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.

Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.

I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.