Top 160 Aleksandar Hemon Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

102. “Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you’re not political because you don’t do anything between elections.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

103. “Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

104. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

105. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

106. “I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn’t like losing at all.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

107. “Shiny teeth were footnote to her smile.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

109. “Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

110. “Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

111. “You have to create a form from the life that exists, not the other way around. If it comes out in these little pieces, that’s what it is.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

113. “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

114. “What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

115. “Man reaches a point in his life when unchanging becomes a matter of pride; the habits and remnants of youth are thereafter kept in the museum of the self.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

116. “Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

118. “The implicit requirements of the committed relationship Joshua was pursuing with Kimiko assumed spending Saturday nights together for the purposes of intimacy.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

119. “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

120. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

122. “There’s no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

124. “One person’s garbage is another person’s commodity.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

125. “I long for, not a writer’s retreat – I can write in any situation – but a reader’s retreat.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

126. “To write has to be related to a drive inside.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

127. “Outsider means “I will accept the possibility that I don’t have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain.””

— Aleksandar Hemon

128. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

129. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

131. “I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that’s the center.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

132. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

133. “Literature is always something – it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

135. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

136. “Hence Joshua giggled to himself: life appeared to him exactly like the joint burning inexorably toward his fingertips – once it’s smoked it cannot be unsmoked.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

137. “I have a hard time imagining a country or a government where I would say, “Oh, this is good,” where I could live under a government that I respect for a day or a week, even to see what it feels like.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

138. “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.””

— Aleksandar Hemon

139. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

140. “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

141. “As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Aleksandar Hemon

143. “George W. Bush spoke to the camera, his face so decisively earnest that it was clear he was lying, his button eyes lit up with amateurish subterfuge. Only truly great men can be adept at shameless lying, Joshua thought. This dude was straining to the point of snapping.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

144. “What you demand from storytelling is a moral – even political – import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

145. “The detectives ransack the place with the passion of soldiers fighting a just war.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

146. “I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you’re not, to think of it as sovereign because you’re not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

147. “I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

148. “You’ve never been married, so you don’t know, but it is a fragile thing. Nothing ever goes away, everything stays inside it. It is a different reality.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

149. “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.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

150. “It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.”

— Aleksandar Hemon