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" New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Hollywood
New
Stars
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" 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. "
Aleksandar Hemon
School
Important
Got
" I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Birthday
Work
Singing
" I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Line
Like
Some
" I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation. "
Aleksandar Hemon
True
Wait
Mature
" I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Bad
America
Choices
" 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. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Limit
Poetry
Write
" 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. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Book
Writing
Trouble
" Memory narrativises itself. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Itself
Memory
" In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Word
Fiction
Literature
" I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability - the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Wait
Everything
Love
" 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. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Reward
Feel
My Life
" To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Book
Difference
Different
" I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Now
Path
Sin
" 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. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Better
Best
You
" Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Her
Daughter
Hat
" I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Life
Home
Live
" I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Long
I Can
Retreat
" 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. "
Aleksandar Hemon
American
America
Planning
" For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house, it was to salvage photos. "
Aleksandar Hemon
People
Life
House
" 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. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Me
Start
Upset
" I did not intend to stay; I had no experience in the United States - I may have been here less than 24 hours - but I knew I would never get inside there. And 'there' not being America necessarily, but that harmonious mode of living that some people are lucky enough to have in this country. "
Aleksandar Hemon
America
People
Experience
" 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. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Writer
Superiority
Kind
" The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Goals
Privilege
You
" 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. "
Aleksandar Hemon
Myself
War
Thought