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You Devise Ways To Tell A Story That Complies With Your Sensibility. Style And Method Are Really Extensions Of Your Present Sensibility.
-Aleksandar Hemon
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You Devise Ways To

Aleksandar Hemon
...
You Devise Ways To Tell A Story That Complies With Your Sensibility. Style And Method Are Really Extensions Of Your Present Sensibility.

Understanding the Quote: "you devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility...."

This quote by Aleksandar Hemon reflects deeply on the theme of style. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Style, Stories, Way, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Aleksandar Hemon interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon is celebrated for insightful thoughts on style and stories. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Style
Stories
Way
More From Aleksandar Hemon
No Reader Owes Me Anything - I Am Owed Nothing For My Noble Efforts, Because My Writing Was Always Unconditional, Always Coming Out Of Inner Necessity.
Writing
Effort
Noble
Chicago Has Very Few Public Spaces Where People Are Encouraged To Get Together. It's Partly To Prevent Riots, And Also To Segregate A City With A History Of Racial Segregation.
Space
Cities
People
My Books Have Been Published All Over Europe. They Read Me There, And I Want To Read Them Back. I Also Spend A Lot Of Time In Europe, Often Meeting Writers, And I'm Sick Of Apologizing For The Embarrassing Shortage Of Translations In America.
Book
Sick
Apologizing
It Is My Belief That We As Human Beings Have A Need To Tell Stories - I Think It's Evolutionary. So You Can Think Of The Short Story As A Literary Form, Or You Can Instead Think Of Stories.
Thinking
Needs
Stories
I Suppose I'm Interested In Sorrow, Which Is Very Different From Depression Or Despair. Sorrow Is Continuous With The World; It Allows For Creativity.
Creativity
Sorrow
Despair
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.
Home
Nowhere To Go
World
There's No Bad Writing; You Did Something. I Was Operating Inside Language, And I Did Something. I'm Not Ashamed Of It.
Writing
Bad Writing
Language
When I Was Young, I Was All About Personal Sovereignty And That Junk, Because There Was No Privacy And The Available Ideologies Were Collective, Both Socialism/communism And Nationalism.
Junk
Privacy
Socialism
Politics Is About Ethics And Morality, Openly Or Not Openly.
Ethics
Morality
I Think It's Interesting, From A Creative Point Of View, To Have Witnessed The Loss Of Consciousness On A National Level And On A Cultural Level - Bush Had 91 Percent Support In The Polls After 9/11. We Wanted To Kick Some Ass!
Loss
Thinking
Views
New York Is The Hollywood Of The Publishing Industry, Complete With Stars, Starlets, Suicidal Publishers/producers, Intrigues, And A Lot Of Money.
New York
Stars
Suicidal
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.
Fiction
Lines
Facts
I Don't Know The Numbers, But Roughly Half Of The People Who Came Through Ellis Island Returned Home. They Came Here To Make Money, Not To Make History.
Home
Islands
Numbers
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.
Differences
Views
Funny Things
There Is A Point In Fighting. There Is A Point In Struggle. Not Wholesale Revolution, Maybe, That Might Not Be Possible, An Absolutely Just Society, But There Are Plenty Of Spaces And Places Where It's Worth Putting Up A Fight.
Struggle
Fighting
Space
I Want To Make Money, And I Would Like To Have A Lot Of Money, But I Still Believe That The Only Reason To Write Is That Somehow It Will Make Something Or Somebody Better.
Believe
Writing
Want
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.
War
America
Choices
I Actually Didn't Listen To The Beatles Song 'nowhere Man' When I Was Writing My Book Of The Same Name. What I Listened To A Lot Was 'abbey Road.' Its Disjointedness And Its Readiness To Confuse Only To Delight Were Inspiring To Me.
Song
Book
Writing
If I Represent The World As It Is As Harmonious, That's A Political Position.
Political
World
Position
I Hate Traveling And Being Away From My Family. But I Like Meeting My Readers, As What I Write Is Actualized In Them. Those Encounters Are Exhilarating To Me.
Hate
Writing
Encounters
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.
Moments
Meditating
Know How
There Is A Logic [to My Reading], But I Can't Define It. I Like Reading Impulsively. I Collect Books, I Have A Lot Of Them, But Most Of Them I Have Not Read Yet. I'll Read Them When They Call Me From The Shelf.
Book
Reading
Logic
Wherever There's Capitalism There's This Inclination Toward Simplicity. There's Also A Human Need To Process Complicated Things By Turning Them Into Something Else.
Simplicity
Needs
Complicated
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.
Writing
Mean
Stories
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.
Laziness
Domain
Familiar
I'm Not Nervous If I Think About Something For Nine Years And Then I Don't Write It. Even If It Fades It Doesn't Concern Me. It'll Come Back If It's Worth It.
Writing
Thinking
Years
There Are Many Things I Think About That Never Get To The Point Of Becoming Serious. In Other Words, I Try To Talk Myself Out Of Writing, Sometimes For Many Years, And When I Run Out Of Arguments, I Write.
Running
Writing
Thinking
People Will Always Tell Stories. The Publishing Industry Might Vanish, But Not Stories.
People
Stories
Might
Every Writer Owes Something To A Particular Tradition He/she Grew Up In. But No Serious Writer - Other Than The Militantly Nationalist Ones - Would Reduce His/her Domain Of Influence To A Single Tradition. Furthermore, Historical Breaks Are So Common And Large In Europe That There Are Ruptures In Every Tradition Which Then Connect The Same Generations Across National Borders. Younger Eastern European Writers, For Instance, Have More In Common With Other Writers Of The Same Age In Europe, Than With The Previous, Communist-era Generations In Their Own Countries.
Country
Historical
Age
Literature Is Always Something - It Is Either Story Or Poetry, Ideally Both. That Is, You Always Know What It Is And Even If The Interpretation Is Not Available, The Experience Of Language Is.
Stories
Literature
Language
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.
Artist
Blow
Reality
I Much Preferred Winning To Thinking And I Didn't Like Losing At All.
Winning
Thinking
Losing
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.
Country
America
People
Where Can You Go From Nowhere, Except Deeper Into Nowhere?
Deeper
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.
Married
I Loved You
Died
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.
Book
Writing
Mean
I Don't Believe In Inspiration. I Write When I Can't Avoid Writing Anymore.
Believe
Inspiration
Writing
I'm Bright, But There Are Lots Of Bright Writers And People Everywhere. In No Way, At No Point Do I Think I'm Better Than Them.
Thinking
People
Way
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.
Distance
Home
Two
I Am Itching To Criticize Some Well-regarded Writers' Works, But I Am Not Doing It Because I Am Perfectly Aware That My Critique Could Easily Be Reduced To Envy Or Just Plain Meanness.
Envy
Criticize
Meanness
I Am Just Like Everybody Else...because There Is Nobody Like Me In The Whole World.
World
Nobody Likes Me
Like Me
To Me, The Solidarity Of Readers Is Far More Important Than The Solidarity Of Writers, Particularly Since Readers In Fact Find Ways To Connect Over A Book Or Books, Whatever They May Be.
Book
Important
May
God Knows Our Despair. God Wants His Chosen People To Live In Peace. God Loves Life, Cares Less About Death. We Need To Live. I Want To Live, I Want My Children To Live. Everyone I Know Wants To Live. You Have To Ask Yourself What Is More Important To You, Life Is Death. What Is This World About - Life Or Death?
Children
Love Life
People
It's Difficult For Me To Understand How It Was Possible To Live Under The Bush Regime For Eight Years And Then Just Roll Over And Do Other Things.
Eight
Years
Regimes
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.
Thinking
Looks
Used
To Me There's No Difference Between A Book Of Stories And A Novel - They're Just Slightly Different Shapes.
Book
Differences
Shapes
The Way I Think Of My Work Is That I Have To Think Up The Way To Tell A Story, Starting From Scratch. The Changes In The Industry Concern Me In A General Way Because I Think Civilization Is Doomed.
Thinking
Civilization
Scratches
Nobody Deserves Death, Yet Everybody Gets It.
Deserve
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.
Mind
Brain
Consciousness
I Wanted Us To Share The Sense That The Number Of Wrong Moves Far Exceeds The Number Of Good Moves, To Share The Frightening Instability Of The Correct Decision, To Bond In Being Confounded.
Moving
Numbers
Decision
I Don't Think That Everyone Should Have A Philosophical Answer To Any Given Question. There Are Things That Need To Be Done.
Philosophical
Thinking
Should Have
You Devise Ways To Tell A Story That Complies With Your Sensibility. Style And Method Are Really Extensions Of Your Present Sensibility.
Style
Stories
Way
You Don't Want Your Neurosurgeon To Have Doubts About The Meaning Of It All While He Or She Is Operating On Your Brain.
Doubt
Brain
Neurosurgeons
Politics Imagined As Direct Agency, Whether By Voting Or By Participating In Politics, You Can Think You're Not Political Because You Don't Do Anything Between Elections.
Thinking
Agency
Voting
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.
Book
Ideas
Space
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.
War
Mean
Swings
There's Something In Psychology Called The Narrative Paradigm, Which Essentially Means That We Think Of Our Lives As Stories In Which We Are The Main Characters.
Character
Mean
Thinking
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.
Telling Stories
Way
Kind
For A Fight To Be Productive, Or At Least Relevant, Writers Should Fight Over Different Demands They Put Upon Writing (as An Individual, Private Act) And Literature (a Network Of Relations In Which We Are All Involved).
Writing
Fighting
Different
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.
People
World
Knows
Lord, Why Did You Leave Me In These Woods?
Woods
Lord
Leaving Me
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.
Fall
Sky
Piano
The Mind Is Complicated And You Can't Trace The Roots Of Its Processes, But There Is Something About Mathematical And Algorithmic Patterns That I Like To Recognize In Things.
Roots
Mind
Patterns
Washington D.c.! Congress Is Full Of Self-declared Outsiders.
Self
Outsiders
Congress
If You Have Information You've Got The World By The Balls. But We Have To Convert Information Into Knowledge In Order To Make It Humanly Useful.
Order
Balls
World
Because Sometimes You Have No Control Over Life And It Keeps You Far Away From Who You Love.
Sometimes
Far Away
Even If You Tried To Extinguish Your Personality, What Is Left In The Story Will Reflect It, Perhaps By Its Negation. Our Lives Provide The Bricks From Which We Build These Cathedrals.
Personality
Stories
Bricks
I Think About The Story While I Think About Other Things. This Is An Important Part Of The Process: I Look At It Sideways. If I Look Straight At It, It Produces Nothing Other Than What Seem Like Complicated, Brilliant Designs That Fall Apart The Following Morning. In Some Way Stories Mature When You're Not Looking.
Morning
Fall
Thinking
I Long For, Not A Writer's Retreat - I Can Write In Any Situation - But A Reader's Retreat.
Writing
Long
Retreat
Memory Narrativises Itself.
Memories
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.
Real
Silly
Effort
I'll Take Any Life In Which I Can Make Choices And Have Agency, And America Is Not A Bad Place For All That.
Agency
America
Choices
In The Olden Days, A Memoir Was Something Written By Churchill And People Like That, Because They Had A Grand Experience And Considered It Useful For Future Generations. And Then It Became What It Became - A Public Purging In Which Other People Have The Chance To Judge You And Then Forgive You, Perhaps Learning Something From Your Sorry Example.
Sorry
People
Judging
An Unjust World Represented As Harmonious Is A Political Position.
Political
World
Unjust
I Believe People Are Much More Complicated Than They Can Handle.
Believe
People
Complicated
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.
Party
Rocks
Self
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.
Novelists
Kind
Call 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.
Cities
Soul
Geography
The World Is Always Greater Than Your Desires; Plenty Is Never Enough.
Contentment
Desire
World
I Cannot Live Or Write Without Music. It Stimulates The Normally Dormant Parts Of My Brain That Come In Handy When Constructing Fiction.
Writing
Brain
Fiction
Time Does Nothing But Hand You Down Shabbier And Older Things.
Hands
Doe
Projecting Yourself Until Everything Is Talking About You Is, Of Course, A Self-flattering Form Of Self-pity
Self
Talking
Pity
It Was Always Clear To Me That I Would Have To Earn My Readers, Some I Would Have To Find, Some To Create.
Clear
Reader
I Want To Change Something. I Want To Stop The Germs From Attacking My Daughters.
Daughter
Want
Germs
I Do Believe - And I Know I Shouldn't - That Art Transcends Money And Success And Any Of That. You Can Still Do It If You're Not Clinging To The Notion Of Nobility.
Art
Believe
Clinging
In Some Way There Is No Real Life. It's Always The Story Of Your Life That You're Living.
Real
Real Life
Stories
I Tend To Wait For True Stories To Mature Into Fiction. Most Of My Fiction Grew Out Of A Long-germinating Real-life Situation.
Real
Long
Waiting
Writing Is A Mode Of Agency In The World That Is Different From Mere Employment. There Has To Be Some Sort Of Ethical Or Moral Drive, Even If You Are Unaware Of It.
Writing
Agency
World
I Write And Read With The Assumption That Literature Contains Knowledge Of Human Experience That Is Not Available Otherwise.
Writing
Literature
Assumption
Everyone Operates Within Their Own Domain And Obviously Those Domains Overlap To A Great Extent.
Domain
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.
Rocks
People
Say Anything
The Balls Do Not Make A Writer.
Balls
I End Up Writing Something Every Day, Since I Develop Six Or Seven Things At The Same Time - Soccer Columns, This And That.
Soccer
Writing
Six
I Had An Epiphany: I Was A Loser.
Loser
Epiphany
I Recognized Him Then; That Is, I Finally Comprehended What I Had Known But Had Never Been Able To Formulate: He Had Always Been Complete. He Had Finished The Work Of Becoming Himself, Long Before Any Of Us Could Even Imagine Such A Feat Was Possible.
Long
Able
Becoming
It Is So Much Easier To Deal With The Dead Than With The Living. The Dead Are Out Of The Way, Merely Characters From Stories About The Past, Never Again Unreadable, No Misunderstandings Possible, The Pain Coming From Them Stable And Manageable. Nor Do You Have To Explain Yourself To Them, To Justify The Fact Of Your Life.
Pain
Character
Past
Every Artist, Writers Included, Have An Ethics And An Aesthetics, Whether They Can Formulate Them Or Not. I Happen To Think That It Is Good To Be Able To Formulate - It Is Good To Know What You Are Doing And To Be Able To Talk About It.
Artist
Thinking
Able
In Bosnian, There's No Distinction In Literature Between Fiction And Nonfiction; There's No Word Describing That.
Fiction
Literature
Bosnians
I Spotted A Can In The Corner Whose Red Label Read Sadness. Was There So Much Of It They Could Can It And Sell It? A Bolt Of Pain Went Through My Intestines Before I Realized That It Was Not Sadness But Sardines.
Pain
Sadness
Labels
Despite All That I Know Rationally, And Everything That I Can Put Into Words, I Can Say That I Have Difficulty Giving Up The Notion Of The Nobility Of Art.
Art
Giving Up
Difficulty
My Country's Main Exports Are Stolen Cars And Sadness.
Country
Sadness
Car
There's No Connection Between Consumption Of Art And Moral Stamina At All.
Art
Connections
Moral
I Wish I Could Avoid The People Who Have Threatened Me. My Favorite Threat Is That I Will Be Thrown In The River Miljacka, Which Is At Most Knee-deep, With My Feet Bound In Cement.
Feet
Rivers
People
There Are Studies That Have Shown That We Make Decisions, Ethical And Otherwise, Based On The Way We Imagine Ourselves As Characters In The Stories Of Our Lives. In Other Words, If We Imagine Ourselves Brave Or Crazy Or Open, We're More Likely To Make Decisions In A Given Situation Based On How We Imagine Ourselves, Whatever The Facts May Be.
Crazy
Character
Decision
Chicago Is Not A Bad Place To Live. But The Usual Story Of Immigration Is The Happy Fulfillment Of Human Potential In America That Is Not Available Anywhere Else - It's Propaganda, Really. It's More Complicated Than That.
America
Usual
Chicago
I Have A Hard Time Imagining A Country Or A Government Where I Would Say, "oh, This Is Good," Where I Could Live Under A Government That I Respect For A Day Or A Week, Even To See What It Feels Like.
Country
Hard Times
Government
I Never Thought Of Myself As An Outsider. Because Outside Of What? You Would Have To Give Advantage To This Space Where You're Not, To Think Of It As Sovereign Because You're Not There. I Was Always In The Center Of Where I Needed To Be.
Thinking
Space
Giving
I've Never Had A Stupid Student In My Life. I Never Look Down On My Students. I Never Thought, "look At These People." I Might Argue With Them And I Think That Some Of Them Might Have Misconceptions - That They Might Be Infected By The Intellectual Laziness That Is The Foundation Of American Popular Culture, And Of Capitalism, If You Wish. But Part Of My Job As A Teacher Is To Work With That - Against That.
Teacher
Jobs
Stupid
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.
Daughter
Mother
Zero
The Incessant Perpetuation Of Collective Fantasies Makes People Crave The Truth And Nothing But The Truth - Reality Is The Fastest American Commodity.
Reality
People
Fantasy
What Fiction And Art Can Do, Particularly Narrative Art, Is Construct Consciousness - In A Sense, We Have To Do It For The First Time, Every Time.
Art
Narrative
Firsts
The More You Lose, The More Is To Be Lost, Yet It Matters Less.
Matter
Lost
Loses
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.
Writing
School
Important
It's Not That War Crimes Stop As Soon As A Novel About Them Is Published. Literature Operates Slowly, It Is Always Inching Toward Bliss, Never Quite Getting There.
War
Literature
Never Quit
I Dont Make Notes For Myself Because I Either Lose Them Or They Make No Sense To Me At All. I Once Found A Piece Of Paper With The Note: Everything. Apparently I Made A Note To Myself Not To Forget Everything!
Forget Everything
Pieces
Paper
You Can See The Diversity That Pieces In The Anthology Represent, And Then The Interconnections-obvious And Less Obvious-between Various Stories Or Between Various Modes Of Storytelling. Diversity Generates Need For Conversation, Conversation Generates Common Interests, As Well As Differences. Literature, As A Human Project, Is All About That.
Diversity
Literature
Common
Language Is So Inherent To Humanity, So Necessary For Even Basic Thinking, That Stories And Poetry Are Available To Anyone Who Can Process Language.
Thinking
Humanity
Stories
Arabs Are A Complete Abstraction In The Propaganda World And All The Death And Destruction Is Completely Unreal To Americans.
World
Propaganda
Destruction
I Know A Lot Of People In The City, At All Levels, Horizontally And Vertically - And That To Me Is A Privilege, To Me As A Person But Also A Writer. I've Dined With Billionaires, And I Play Soccer With Busboys.
Soccer
Play
Cities
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.
Home
Two
Parent
Home Is Where Somebody Notices When You Are No Longer There.
Home
Understanding
Deep Thought
The Perfect Borscht Is What Life Should Be But Never Is.
Perfect
Should
Borscht
We, As Writers, Have To Figure Out A Way To Create A Consciousness In Language. It's Crazy Even To Attempt To Do That.
Crazy
Way
Language
It's So Internalized, The Way Your Mind Works In Relation To Anything - It's A Process, But Then It Isn't. It's Working All The Time.
Mind
Way
Process
Rilke Said That Art Can Come Only Out Of Inner Necessity. I Write Because I Must. Or Because I Cannot Not Write.
Art
Writing
Said
Belief And Delusion Are Incestuous Siblings.
Sibling
Belief
Delusion
As Long As There Are Living Human Beings, There Will Be Language And Stories.
Long
Stories
Language
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.
Wall
Writing
Space
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.
Class
Goal
Achievement
When I Was In High School, I Was In A Special Math Class. I Was Infatuated With Physics, Particularly Nuclear Physics, Einstein, And The Big Bang. I Read A Lot About Black Holes. And Partly Because I'm So Lazy I Thought You Could Do All This Just By Looking At The Sky And Thinking Up Universes. It Didn't Seem Like Hard Work When I Was A Kid, So I Enrolled In This Class.
School
Kids
Hard Work
What You Demand From Storytelling Is A Moral - Even Political - Import. I Tend To Shun That Didactic Aspect.
Political
Demand
Moral
I Cannot Think Of A Country In Which I Would Be Happy With The Government And Dominant Ideology And Available Propaganda.
Country
Thinking
Government
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.
Games
Redemption
Path
I Have Been On The Margins In Terms Of Having To Find A Place To Live And Getting A Job, But At Some Point, And Before That Point, I Always Thought No Matter Where I Am, That's The Center.
Jobs
Matter
Places To Live
I Started Appreciating And Valuing Different Things. Some Things Just Became Insufferable To Me, And Not Just Literature. I Used To Like Horror Movies And Now I Couldn't Stand Them.
Appreciate
Different
Literature
Your Nightmares Follow You Like A Shadow, Forever.
Forever
Shadow
Nightmare
Whatever Solidarity I Have Established With Other Writers Individually, It Is Usually Organized Around Books. We Connected As Readers, As It Were, Not Writers.
Book
Solidarity
Reader
The Beauty Of Literature - Also Its Limit - Is That It Is Inescapably Personal, Even If You're Writing Science Fiction.
Writing
Fiction
Literature
If You Find Yourself As A Person In Unfamiliar Territory, You Will Grasp On To What Is Already Familiar.
Finding Yourself
Territory
Familiar
We Apply The Language That Is Comforting And Comfortable And Familiar In Order To Grasp That Which Confuses And Scares Us. That Is The First Step Toward Cliché And Stereotype, As They're Comforting Devices. They Reduce The Confusing World To The Already Familiar. We're Always Smoothing Out The Bumps Of Actual Living To Turn It Into Narratable Life.
Order
Comforting
Confusing
We Dreamt Of Light, But Hoped For Darkness.
Light
Darkness
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.
Thinking
Narrative
Gaps
We Hated Pretentiousness; It Was A Form Of Self-hatred.
Self
Hatred
Form
I'm A Dilettante By Temperament. I Don't Have Any Expectation.
Expectations
Temperament
Dilettantes
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.
Flower
Past
Reality
What I Was Interested In Is The Lens Organizing My Sovereign Space. I Avoid The Term Outsider And Also Exile For The Same Reason. Outsider Implies A Kind Of Nobility.
Space
Sovereign
Lenses
I Don't Like Having A Teaching Job - Office Hours And Conferences And Committees And Bosses And All That - But I Tend To Enjoy Teaching, And I Design The Course In Such A Way That There'll Be Pleasure In That.
Jobs
Teaching
Office
There Has To Be A Kind Of Grassroots Push, A Movement, As It Were, Against The Inherent Isolationism Of American Capitalism As Practiced In The Publishing Industry. There Need To Be Grants And Government Support And A Few Publishers, Mainstream And Independent, Who Are Not Afraid To Challenge American Readership. We Need To Build A Network Of Translators, Publishers And Readers. We Hope That Our Annual Anthology Might Provide An Upsurge In Interest For European Fiction And Then, As We Publish It Every Year, Become A Habit To Many Readers.
Independent
Support
Challenges
My Skin Was The Border Between The World And Me.
Skins
Borders
World
The Hopeless Hope Is One Of The Early Harbingers Of Spring, Bespeaking An Innocent Belief That The World Might Right Its Wrongs And Reverse Its Curses Simply Because The Trees Are Coming Into Leaf.
Spring
Tree
World
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.
Art
Diversity
People
Anything That Might Come Under Arts Should Not Be Subject To The Whims Of The Idiotic Market Because The Market's Stupid, And It Gravitates Toward Simplicity - Towards Essentializing Things So They Can Be Sold.
Art
Stupid
Simplicity
Europe Is A Rapidly Changing Place, On Every Level. Immigration, Post-communist Transitions, The Unification, Steady Presence Of War And Conflict, The Inescapable Challenges To The Notion Of National Literature/culture-it All Exerts Pressure Upon Writers Who Must Be Aware Of The Transformational Possibilities Of The Situation.
War
Challenges
Literature
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.
Running
People
House
Outsider Means "i Will Accept The Possibility That I Don't Have Responsibility For What Is Happening Inside My Domain."
Responsibility
Mean
Outsiders
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.
Waiting
Care
Existence
Sometimes I Don't Write At All. Someone Once Asked Me, "what Do You Do When You're Not Writing?" And I Said, "i Idle."
Writing
Sometimes
Said
To Write Has To Be Related To A Drive Inside.
Writing
Related
Memoir Implies The Need To Reveal Something About Yourself - To Recount Your Life For Educational Purposes.
Educational
Needs
Purpose
What I Don't Like About America Is Not Necessarily An American Thing; It's A Capitalist Thing. This Is The Vatican Of Capitalism.
America
Capitalist
Capitalism
I've Read Books In School That Were Written By Ideological Rote - They Were Brainwashers. Therefore, Any Art, Any Literature, That Has A Clearly Defined Political Goal Is Repellent To Me.
Art
Book
School
Your Memories Become Fantasies If They Are Not Shared, And Your Life In All Its Triviality Becomes A Legend.
Memories
Legends
Fantasy
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