Josip Novakovich > Quotes

“You don't need to wait for inspiration to write. It's easier to be inspired while writing than while not writing...”
― Josip Novakovich, Fiction Writer's Workshop

“He must have given up on image making because his eyes had failed to see something they had yearned for; his mind had failed to capture whatever it had hoped, and that probing gaze perhaps expressed alarm at the emptying of his vision, at the dissolution of the things see, observed, into a meaningless vastness.”
― Josip Novakovich, Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust

“Когато си млад, хем умът ти сече като бръснач, хем големи глупости вършиш.”
― Josip Novakovich, Yolk: Short Stories

“The destruction of Dresden was an overkill. It was done in February, 1945, when it was clear that Germany would lose the war. Russians could have already swept across the country but they waited for some reason. Firebombing mostly old people and children and women, hardly any of them culprits in the war, wasn’t the most ethical thing to do, but it was done, and now, watching the restoration of the cathedral, which takes place for years and takes millions of dollars, it is clear how much easier destruction is than construction.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“But that did not make Mirko happy - the world was melting away; what was a grade compared with the world? He gazed through the windows and watched the thickly falling snow.”
― Josip Novakovich, Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust

“The basis for the feminist movement was a striving for equality between the sexes. Women can write erotica; therefore, men can write erotica. Or rather, we are allowed to; whether we can is a different issue.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“When fatness was an exception, it was part of the canon of beauty. Now that leanness is an exception, its symptoms are canonized.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“My friend gave me an opportunity to be bad, that is, free.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“In the train, I read a special issue of Der Spiegel, about the Germans who had been driven out in ethnic cleansing campaigns at the end of World War One. Almost three million from Sudetenland. The Czechs, who offered hardly any resistance to the Germans, celebrated the victory given them by Russians in such a manner. Poland, Yugoslavia, Germans were driven out of these countries, mass executed. The story is not given much attention because people are put in the mass category—Germans, the perpetrators, not the victims. Well, are they all the same? Did they all vote the same way? Those in other countries didn’t vote at all, and their sympathies may have been largely with the invading armies, but it is not these Germans who decided anything or started anything. If the US were suddenly to lose a war that Bush initiates, should all the Americans be driven out from everywhere, be mass executed, all on account of being Americans, even if Bush didn’t win the presidency with a majority vote? Hitler, likewise, never got the majority, but worked with coalitions. If one is not to romanticize, and permanently divide nations into the good ones and the bad ones, and thus perpetrate chauvinism, all these stories have to be told.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Describing men, of course, I run into the same problems—aquiline nose, chiseled features, bullish neck, leonine hair, steely gaze, bronze tan—but somehow the arsenal of clichés and materials for describing men seems smaller. Many feminists are right to claim that the male is on the whole less objectified than the female; the male is treated more frequently as the subject rather than the object.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Enemies keep you alert, competitive, and friendships lull you into mediocrity, and through peer pressure, keep you back and down, and eventually, down and out. Some of the most excellent friends I knew in my hometown became alcoholics, and true enough, they are fun to talk with, telling jokes and anecdotes, but they sacrificed their lives to their friendships, proving that they were fun, that they were not betraying friends by leaving hometown for large cities and countries and professions.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“How to describe the woman? Silky hair, velvety lips. No, it won’t do, I’m using fabrics, constructing a doll. How about coppery hair, or golden locks of hair, or platinum blonde? No, now I’m doing some kind of industrial metallurgy with precious metals; in addition to everything else, the woman sounds like a commodity. And what’s “locks of hair” supposed to mean? Lock, some kind of bondage? No, strike it out. Ruby lips, pearly white teeth, brilliant smile. No, now I’m making the woman out of precious stones, and out of clichés. Almond-shaped eyes, hazel-colored eyes, pear-shaped waist, apple-red cheeks, lips like the bud of a moist flower, peachy fuzz on her upper lip. Now I’m making up a woman out of fruits, plants. She strode like a gazelle. Her snaky waist coiled and uncoiled. Now I’m demeaning the woman, making her into an animal. On the other hand, you can call a woman a goddess. Aphrodite, Venus, or at least a demi-god, angelic beauty. But these terms were all invariably overused, clichés. In addition, if you call a woman Aphrodite, it might seem like an oblique way of saying that the woman is overweight.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“I was caught between the crossfire of the atheist school and a Baptist church and family. Both had a prescription for how I was supposed to think and behave. On most points, they actually agreed. I was supposed to be clean, have short hair, talk modestly, listen and obey, never fight. Consequently, I was slovenly, grew long hair, and fought every day.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“I was taught not to distinguish between patriotism and nationalism; the word patriotism was an attempt to present the same ugly nationalist phenomenon of favoring your country over others; patriotism was a patriarchal swindle that made it easy to recruit soldiers to shed the blood of other peoples.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“When I talk on the phone with my brother Ivo, who is a theology instructor at Baylor, he invariably wants to talk politics, and I hear clicking in the background, and I say, Why talk politics, just remember where we are! I used to have that experience with my older brother Vlado in Yugoslavia: I would want to expound my political views, but he would point to the phone, and say, Why talk politics, remember where we are. This is not America. How things have changed! Now I tell my brother Ivo, Remember where we are. This is not Croatia! Now I am tempted to say, Remember where we are. This is not America. We as Americans are being exiled from our country of liberty through the general paranoia being injected into our asses. The total spying which we suspected in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and East Germany, is only now possible, in the States, through credit cards, computers, EZ passes, surveillance cameras, and well-meaning neighbors.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“This was his third attempt to escape Yugoslavia, for which he was rewarded by two years of treatment in the insane asylum. The official political reasoning was simple: if you wanted to leave a healthy society like socialist Yugoslavia to live in the decadent West, you were insane.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Countries change, of course, and it is still the same country, in a way, resembling a McCarthy America, except that McCarthy’s America was not in debt. This is a bankrupt America, bankrupted partly by its suspicions and overspending on the military and over-reliance on consumerism.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Strangely enough, I am beginning to feel like an exile when I go to a polling station in PA and people hold placards approving attacking Middle Eastern countries, supporting the troops. Imagine if in Nazi Germany people said, Look, we know the war is wrong, but we love our boys and we support them. It’s the wrong time to withhold our support now that they are struggling for German ideals, defending Auschwitz. The comparison is extreme, but why support the troops in an unsupportable war?”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“You know, a government should be a good thing. The Anglo-Saxons and the Germans rejoice in the phenomenon of government. They think that the recipe for human happiness is that you should make your desires and actions concordant with those of the government. So a German and an American will try to make the government work for him, protect him, and he will be more than happy to murder to preserve that wonderful symbiosis. And if he has some money to invest, he will invest it in the government, buying government bonds. He does this regardless of whether his government happens to be trillions of dollars in debt—that is, practically bankrupt. Despite his rhetoric of private enterprise, a Westerner will invest in his government. And we, Eastern and Central Europeans, and particularly Slavs, we all consider our governments to be absolutely the worst in the world. We are ashamed of our governments, and, as a rule, our government is ashamed of us, trying to improve us statistically, to say that we work more and drink less than we do. We think that there's no greater obstacle to human happiness than the government. So even if we have an institution pregnant with democratic potential, such as workers' self-management, we never even bother to attend a meeting unless absolutely forced. And as for voting, we circle any name without looking at whose it is, out of spite. To a Slav, there is nothing more disgusting than voting. We have an aversion to investing trust in any human being. So how could we single out someone we haven't met but whom we know a priori to be a social upstart and climber? So we spend these workers' self-management meetings, where democracy could be practiced, in daydreams of sex and violence.”
― Josip Novakovich, April Fool's Day

“I remember, in former East Berlin, how startling it was to see the wall cut some streets. The street would go straight into the wall. It would continue on the other side, in another world. At least one street should have remained like that, walled, to remind people of the old division.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“When he moved to another end of our town, our friendship diminished, and I made other friends. I moved to the States, and he stayed home. During the Serbo-Croatian war, he became a Serbian soldier, and I heard reports that he participated in the bombing of our hometown. That friendship seems to be ruined; it is hard to forgive something like that—anyhow, it will take a couple of decades perhaps. On the other hand, maybe the rumor is not true. And maybe I made his childhood bitter, who knows; maybe it was partly because of me that he resented the town.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“...може би искате да създавате нехудожествена проза, но при всяка възможност преобразявате фактите, преувеличавате и ги разкрасявате и дори въвеждате образи, места и събития, които нямат нищо общо с автентичния материал. В такъв случай вие сте роден белетрист, което е далеч по-мило, отколкото да ви кажат, че сте роден лъжец. Белетристиката наподобява в много голяма степен лъжата. Изхождате от нещо реално, но поради някаква конкретна причина (да не ви заловят, да изхитрувате, да вземете пари или каквото и да било) вие променяте поне един ключов елемент при разкриването му. Вместо да си признаете, че са ви посинили окото в бара, където сте се домогвали до приятелката на някого, може да кажете, че както сте си карали ски из Върмонт, при един завой сте се забили в муцуната на заспала мечка. За да не накърните своята гордост, измисляте лъжа и покрай нея — цяла история. Ако ви е навик да лъжете, защо не преодолеете този греховен импулс, като започнете да пишете белетристика?”
― Josip Novakovich, Writing Fiction Step by Step

“Why do we have two ears and one mouth? In order to talk half as much as we listen.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Serbs don’t forget, as the graffito goes, the atrocities that the Croatian ustashas committed against them in World War II. That was repeated in school over and over by history teachers when I was a pupil in Croatia. Many Croats don’t forget the slaughters that the Serb nationalist chetniks committed on the Croatian rural population, although that lesson was passed over in silence in our history lessons. My brother-in-law—who died of stomach cancer, and who had spent the recent war two hundred yards away from the Serb border toward Vukovar, from where his street was shelled almost daily—told me that when he was a child, during World War II, he ran into a ditch full of Croatian peasants massacred by chetniks. He never forgot, and wasn’t even allowed to talk about it because he would be jailed for spreading nationalist propaganda. He told me this in the park after my father’s funeral, at a moment when we were both talking about life, death, and souls. Which is better, to forget or to remember? Of course, to remember, but not to abuse the memories as Serbian leaders have done to spur their armies into aggression against Croats and Muslims. Croats will remember Vukovar. Muslims will remember Srebrenica. And what is the lesson? Not to trust thy neighbor? But that’s perhaps where the trouble began and will resume.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Ако бяхме останали да си пием чай, войната вероятно никога нямаше да се случи.”
― Josip Novakovich, Yolk: Short Stories

“I became sensitive, or at least hypocritical.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“They had talked about how to lose weight. One was telling another that she ought to eat nothing but protein— meats, tofu, eggs—and salads. And for it to work, she needed to have a nutrition guru. They were equally overweight, and this was clearly theoretical rather than practical knowledge.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Едри снежинки се носеха по вятъра като пера на гугутка.
Мирко облегна чело ó стъклото, погледът му се плъзна нагоре по хълма към планината, забулена в бледи облаци и сняг, и чак свят му се зави от радост.

Снежен прах”
― Josip Novakovich, Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust

“I took a walk from Friedrichstrasse Station. That appears to be the train station from which I left in 1983 and in 1988. Then, it was a threatening place, with policemen carrying machine guns and parading around with dogs. Today I walked out to a commercial paradise of stores and of—policemen with machine guns and German shepherds. In fact, there were more police now than then.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Мирко затича към къщи, подскачаше през вихрушката от снежинки, по-богат човек отпреди, заобиколен от повече свят, и този свят бе по-добър и по-голям, точно както портокалът е по-голям небелен, отколкото белен. Сякаш светът, съсухрен и горчив обелен портокал, си бе възвърнал кората и свежестта, а заедно с това и шанса отново да се налее със сокове.

"Снежен прах”
― Josip Novakovich, Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust