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
real real-life stories
In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.
finding-yourself territory familiar
If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.
order comforting confusing
We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.
believe people complicated
I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.
country thinking government
I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.
america capitalist capitalism
What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.
simplicity needs complicated
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.
art stupid simplicity
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.
stories way kind
There's a social and human necessity for some kind of continuity, but it's not axiomatic and not something you're born into; it's something you have to work at. And one of the ways to work at it - perhaps the best - is storytelling: telling stories about yourself to others, telling stories about yourself to yourself, telling stories about others to others.
moments knows meditating
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.
thinking narrative gaps
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.
art giving-up difficulty
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.
people stories might
People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.
crazy character decision
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.