Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

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.

My skin was the border between the world and me.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

One builds one's life in consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.

There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.

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

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

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 don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.

There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.

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

Europe has never been a monolithic space, it contains a lot of people, a lot of languages and infinite supplies of history. I didn't need to do anything to showcase diversity. It is a condition of life and art in Europe, contained in every random sample.

The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

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.