Top 160 Aleksandar Hemon Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

54. “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

55. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

56. “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

57. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

58. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

59. “Right now, it didn’t look good, the life. What doesn’t kill you makes you horny.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

60. “Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate – it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

61. “No reader owes me anything – I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

62. “I don’t believe in inspiration. I write when I can’t avoid writing anymore.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

63. “Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a different place, where the qualities that constituted us were in no need of negotiation. Immigration is an ontological crisis because you are forced to negotiatet the conditions of your selfhood under pereptually changing existential circumstances.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

64. “But nothing has ever been – nor will it ever be – the way it used to be.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

65. “If you find yourself asking: How did I get here? Isador once said, that probably means you are living a life worth living.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

66. “I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn’t stand them.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

67. “Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

70. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

72. “Death comes and takes you away and there is nothing you can do.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

73. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

75. “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

76. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

77. “Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

78. “Men confide, lust rhetorically, copulate hypothetically with women of unacknowledged fantasy.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

79. “I’m a dilettante by temperament. I don’t have any expectation.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

80. “My country’s main exports are stolen cars and sadness.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

82. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

83. “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

84. “To me, the solidarity of readers is far more important than the solidarity of writers, particularly since readers in fact find ways to connect over a book or books, whatever they may be.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

85. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

86. “There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it’s worth putting up a fight.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

87. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

88. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

89. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

90. “You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

91. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

93. “All the players looked absurdly inept, as though they were expressly drafted to be humiliated, entrepreneurs in the industry of losing.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

95. “What would love be without mutually assured oblivion?”

— Aleksandar Hemon

96. “People here snarl and frown a lot, he wrote; he had seen neither a smile nor the sun in months. What is life without beauty, love, and justice?”

— Aleksandar Hemon

97. “We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

98. “I do believe – and I know I shouldn’t – that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you’re not clinging to the notion of nobility.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

100. “I want a book to contain a world – indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.”

— Aleksandar Hemon