Aleksandar Hemon Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.”

“I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.”

“In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.”

“When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.”

“I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.”

“I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.”

“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.”

“I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.”

“A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.”

“When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.”