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
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.
school kids hard-work
When I was in high school, I was in a special math class. I was infatuated with physics, particularly nuclear physics, Einstein, and the Big Bang. I read a lot about black holes. And partly because I'm so lazy I thought you could do all this just by looking at the sky and thinking up universes. It didn't seem like hard work when I was a kid, so I enrolled in this class.
school writing important
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.
cords happens knows vocal
When we're upset, our vocal cords tighten and we can't speak. And when I lie - well, I can't lie, because the same thing happens - everyone who knows me knows that when I start squeaking, I've started lying.
calling continuity separates time trouble
The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.
ask certainly confess confessing life pieces secrets wrote
I really don't feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life, and actually I have nothing to confess and I certainly do not ask for redemption and there is no reward for confessing that I expect.
best praise time worst
You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you write better, and it shouldn't make you write worse, either.
book solidarity reader
Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.
political demand moral
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
book ideas space
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.
book important may
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.
clear reader
It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.
writing effort noble
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.
hate writing encounters
I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.