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).
I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.
Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.
I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.
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.
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be.
My skin was the border between the world and me.
The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.
If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.
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.
What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.
I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.
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.