Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

Everybody is a hero in their own story if you just look.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Of course you're real-like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it.

Every man is a hero of his own story.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Perusing colorful storylines on the backs of book jackets, I realized that none of them could possibly be as dramatic as my life to date. Then sadly, I also realized I could never find the ending of my story from the safety of an armchair.

When I look back at my life and think about what really happened, my memory is obscured by the stories I've created out of those incidents. In stories, as reality melds with art, the result sometimes feels truer than real life.

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it.

As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.'

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

"Margaret" was just my truth. It was what I knew to be true about sixth grade.

Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story. I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses the luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone of telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia.

No one sees themself as the villain in their story.

When we try to describe the truth with words, we distort it and it's no longer truth--it's our story. The story may be true for us, but that doesn't mean it's true for anyone else.

If the experience of reality matters, than nothing is going to be better than dreaming. Because dreams feel real to everybody while they are happening. Some people have vivid imagination, some not so vivid, but everybody has vivid dreams.