{"author":"Aleksandar Hemon","author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon","total_quotes":39,"quotes":[{"text":"The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.","author":"Aleksandar Hemon","tags":["balkan","balkans","writers","writers-on-writing","writers","writing-life"],"id":2441,"author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon"},{"text":"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.","author":"Aleksandar Hemon","tags":["work","singing","party "],"id":23548,"author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon"},{"text":"He drunkenly recognized that the lust was part of something bigger, of a craving to pursue pleasure unreasonably, beyond the right and wrong, to go as far as his body took him. In the body there is no absolute, or free, will, but the body is determined to desire this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity.","author":"Aleksandar Hemon","tags":["body","desire","lust","pleasure"],"id":53052,"author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon"},{"text":"I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible. ","author":"Aleksandar Hemon","tags":["confidence","individuality","insecurity"],"id":78139,"author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon"},{"text":"Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.","author":"Aleksandar Hemon","tags":["storytelling","writing"],"id":83808,"author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon"},{"text":"When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.","author":"Aleksandar Hemon","tags":["imagines","mind","power"],"id":84555,"author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon"},{"text":"The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.","author":"Aleksandar Hemon","tags":["fairness","hope","innocence","spring"],"id":96141,"author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon"},{"text":"All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.","author":"Aleksandar Hemon","tags":["life"],"id":105726,"author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon"},{"text":"I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.","author":"Aleksandar Hemon","tags":["path","game","sin "],"id":119823,"author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon"},{"text":"There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.","author":"Aleksandar Hemon","tags":["control","life","loss-of-control","moments"],"id":119966,"author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":39,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}