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
world nobody-likes-me like-me
I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.
self hatred form
We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.
real long waiting
I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.
novelists kind call-me
I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.
literature fiction-and-nonfiction bosnians
In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
laziness domain familiar
Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.
world propaganda destruction
Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
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.
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.
brain mind consciousness
One of the many conditions that have to be met for a brain to become a mind, and therefore have consciousness, is 'the analog I' around which all the simultaneous inflow of sensations and stimulations are reflected and organized.
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.
crazy way language
We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.
blow reality artist
I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.
philosophical thinking should-have
I don't think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done.