Memory narrativises itself.

- Aleksandar Hemon

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

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.

- Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

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

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

- Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

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

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.

- Aleksandar Hemon

I don't 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!

- Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

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.

- Aleksandar Hemon

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

- Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

- Aleksandar Hemon

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

- Aleksandar Hemon

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