A Quote by Aleksandar Hemon

There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.
I think all of us set out to try and reach as many people. That's the whole point of being in a band: trying to get your music out there. So, any opportunity to do that, within reason. We're informed about where our music is going to be used; we get to say yes or no. There are things we can turn down, and there are things we can agree to. When it comes to movies and stuff like that, it's great for us. I don't think it's selling out. Maybe 10 or 20 years ago it was seen as selling out, but nowadays I think it's the only way to get your music out there.
I write by hand, making many, many corrections. I would say I cross out more than I write. I have to hunt for words when I speak, and I have the same difficulty when writing.
Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.
I'll never run out of things to rap about. Sometimes you sit there and think, 'I can't do it, I can't do it.' Then something happens and you start writing.
The secret to writing is writing. Lots of people I know talk about writing. They will tell me about the book they are going to write, or are thinking about writing, or may write some day in the future. And I know they will never do it. If someone is serious about writing, then they will sit down every day and put some words down on paper.
I feel like we've inherited modern infrastructure, and I could run away from it and become a full-time activist, or I can try to do my job, and try to talk about things I care about, and be able to do something like sponsor a topsoil conference in Nova Scotia, and talk about Bill McKibben, and narrate a documentary about the vanishing of the bees, and try to navigate my way through this world the best way possible. That's what I'm trying to figure out. Probably like many people right now.
I think all writing is about writing. All writing is a way of going out and exploring the world, of examining the way we live, and therefore any words you put down on the page about life will, at some level, also be words about words. It's still amazing, though, how many poems can be read as being analogous to the act of writing a poem. "Go to hell, go into detail, go for the throat" is certainly about writing, but it's also hopefully about a way of living.
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.
For me, no matter how serious the subject is, when I try to write about it, I have to write about it from a comic point of view. It's just the way it comes out.
Like a lot of us, sometimes I'm preaching to the choir, and sometimes my voice doesn't even get heard at all. Sometimes I think that what I'm writing now might not even have an impact for the next three or four generations. Sometimes I sit there and write, and I think, "It'll be two hundred years before they get what I'm writing about."
Life holds many, many, many mysteries, abstract things we all think about. In a film when things get abstract, some people don't appreciate that and they want to leave the theater. Others love to dream, get lost, try to figure things out. I'm one of those people. I like a film, a story that holds concrete things but also abstractions. So when ideas come along that have those things, I'm falling in love and going to work.
I'm mentally getting myself ready to talk about it all year long because I know it's going to come. My main focus is not to really concentrate on that... So many things have to line up, to be healthy and consistent for so many games, to get to that point. I know as we get closer we're going to talk about it more. But believe me, when it's done, if it gets done, it will be a huge achievement and I'm definitely going to soak it in. But at this time, it's not at the top of my mind.
I try to keep my voice in writing, and I think that's why I get so many complaints about how I write.
If I try to figure out what people want and give it to them, it's a failure. If I try to please people and figure out what's going to get me from point A to point B, I fail. But I think if I do what I want to do, in the long run, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point, I think it'll pay off and it'll at least feel honest.
I've never felt fully able to sustain myself because I've run out of money many, many times, and it's been scary.
I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.
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