Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

The way I write things, I just write them with a clash between reality and fantasy mostly. You have to use fantasy to show different sides of reality; it's how it can bend.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

Writing is a way of life. I do it because it's a way of experiencing the world, and trying to come to terms with it and understand it and express it and engage with it. And to me it's a natural extension of reading.

I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.

I should think it extremely improbable that anyone ever wrote for money. Naturally, when he has written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money.

The live show allows me to transcend myself, because it's not about me anymore. The writing process is very much about me but then the live show is not. They feel really different.

The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.

The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.

I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?

Sometimes you write a song in a certain era and it's got a certain kind of significance.

I think writing should be about change.

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

As an actress, you're living something through the duration of the play and its geography. I've always seen writing the same way. It's like somehow I'm moving through the terrain of the book as a performer.

You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.

Songs are kind of alive, I think; once you finish writing them, that doesn't mean that that's it for the song. It can have its own little life, I think.

Why do I write? I guess that's been asked of every writer. I don't know. It isn't any massive compulsion.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.

In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear it's stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of the madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.