Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

It's funny, because I don't think of myself as a novelist. I think of myself as a writer.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

I think most short story writers, at one time or another, over the course of several books, naturally skirt near the edge of one genre or another.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.