Bosniak - Writer | September 9, 1964 -
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
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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.
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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.
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In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
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I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.
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To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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