Aleksandar Hemon

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

“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.”

“Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.”

“All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.”

“There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing...”

“It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.”

“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,...”

“Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.”

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

“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 forgiven...”

“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...”

“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.”

“I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.”

“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 publishe...”

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

“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...”

“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'...”