Aleksandar Hemon (born September 9, 1964) is a Bosnian fiction writer, essayist, and critic. His best known novels are Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008).
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.
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.
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!
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.
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.
People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.
Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.
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 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.
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 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.
To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.
I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.
New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishersproducers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.
Europe is a rapidly changing place, on every level. Immigration, post-communist transitions, the unification, steady presence of war and conflict, the inescapable challenges to the notion of national literatureculture-it all exerts pressure upon writers who must be aware of the transformational possibilities of the situation.
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.
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.
Washington D. C. ! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.
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.