Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemonis a Bosnian-born American fiction writer, essayist, and critic. His best known novels are Nowhere Manand The Lazarus Project...
NationalityBosniak
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth9 September 1964
writing literature assumption
I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.
thinking humanity stories
Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.
book mean writing
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.
art writing said
Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.
writing fighting different
For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).
envy criticize wells
I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.
art book school
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.
literature stories language
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.
balls
The balls do not make a writer.
country hard-times government
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.
struggle fighting space
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.
daughter want germs
I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.
writing thinking years
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.
thinking agency political
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.