Top 160 Aleksandar Hemon Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

2. “I had an epiphany: I was a loser.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

3. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

4. “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

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

6. “Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

13. “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

14. “Writing is nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking burden of decisions devoid of consequences.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

15. “If you wait long enough, something will happen – there has never been a time when nothing happened.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

16. “The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

17. “Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

18. “Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

19. “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

20. “Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

21. “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

22. “In Bosnian, there’s no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there’s no word describing that.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

23. “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

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

25. “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

26. “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

27. “Only gay bars were full; the heterosexual joints were empty – the heteros massively committed to watching television with their falsely monogamous spouses.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

28. “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

29. “I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

30. “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

31. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

32. “Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?”

— Aleksandar Hemon

33. “I don’t know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

34. “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

35. “Hi,” she said, in a whispery voice, and nodded as if to confirm that she really meant it.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

37. “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

38. “Memory narrativises itself.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

39. “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

40. “The liar looks up toward it, hoping against hope that the voices in his head have told him the truth.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

41. “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

42. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

43. “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

44. “My skin was the border between the world and me.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

45. “The beauty of literature – also its limit – is that it is inescapably personal, even if you’re writing science fiction.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

46. “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

47. “Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon