John Edgar Wideman Quotes & Sayings

Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream. — John Edgar Wideman

I have written about the women around me. My ancestors, my relatives, lovers. It was a way of trying to make it all make sense. — John Edgar Wideman

One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back. — John Edgar Wideman

I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains. — John Edgar Wideman

What basketball expresses is what jazz expresses. Certain cultural predispositions to make art. All African-American art has a substratum, or baseline, of improvisation and spontaneity. You find that in both basketball and jazz. — John Edgar Wideman

Writers transform: they throw a hand grenade into the notion of reality that people carry around in their heads. That's very dangerous, very destructive, but not to do it means you are satisfied with the status quo - and that's a kind of danger as well, because a kind of violence is already being perpetuated. — John Edgar Wideman

If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up? — John Edgar Wideman

Real change is always violent, but it may hurt a lot less than what's in place before the violence occurs. — John Edgar Wideman

I always liked to write and had fun writing, but I didn't have any pretensions about being a writer. I liked to read and liked to putz around and write little stories or poems, but my thing was sports. — John Edgar Wideman

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words
rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition
children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down. — John Edgar Wideman

When I wake up in the morning, I need the writing to go to. I begin there. And that's not an accident, I mean, that habit of getting up in the morning and going to my writing first thing. — John Edgar Wideman

Home wasn't so much a house as people, family. — John Edgar Wideman

For African-American people, I am in the business of inventing a reality that gives a different perspective - on history, on crime, on art, on love. — John Edgar Wideman

Paradise Lost is a poem. The old, blind bastard's trying to sing to you. Listen, as the Isley Brothers say, to the music. You must learn to do that before you can expect to understand. Slowly. Slowly. A few licks at a time. — John Edgar Wideman

The primary thing writing and basketball share is the sense that each time you go out, each time you play or begin a piece, it's a new day. You can score 40 points one game, but the next game, those points don't count. You can win the Nobel Literature Prize, but that doesn't make the next sentence of the next book appear. — John Edgar Wideman

In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality. — John Edgar Wideman

My aunt Geraldine was the unofficial historian and storyteller. She had all the information about family members and the gossip that came out of the church because we were very much part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. At family gatherings, the older folk had the floor, had pride of place, and it was their stories I remember. — John Edgar Wideman

I often want things to make definite statements. If I order onions sliced thinly on my hamburger, I don't want them to come out sort of medium. But that doesn't mean it's a reasonable desire, in all things. — John Edgar Wideman

I don't understand why black people have been so quiescent, so passive over the hundreds of years of American history. Why hasn't there been more violence, more armed struggle? I know answers to some of that, but it seems to me it's an issue of faith, an abiding faith in some sort of great beyond, or great spirit, or even in the American dream. — John Edgar Wideman

Thank you, Jesus, for blindness that every once in a great while allows one of us to hit the target. — John Edgar Wideman

Looking at each other like, What the fuck's going on here? We big-time undercover supercops. — John Edgar Wideman

My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South. — John Edgar Wideman

I wish I had time to listen to music more. — John Edgar Wideman

I don't make that hard and fast distinction between political and nonpolitical writing. I write about what bothers me. — John Edgar Wideman

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently. — John Edgar Wideman

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up. — John Edgar Wideman

All Stories are True. — John Edgar Wideman

I write what I want to write, and then, when it's finished, I use my judgment to see whether or not I think it's intrusive. If it is problematic, then I ask those involved. I won't necessarily do what they say. But I do consult. I haven't had too many problems. Nobody's really gotten angry at me. Nobody, as far as I know, has felt betrayed. — John Edgar Wideman

When it's played the way is supposed to be played, basketball happens in the air; flying, floating, elevated above the floor, levitating the way oppressed peoples of this earth imagine themselves in their dreams. — John Edgar Wideman

My mother was a reader; my father was a reader. Not anything particularly sophisticated. My mother read fat historical or romantic novels; my father liked to read Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of stuff. Whatever they brought in, I read. — John Edgar Wideman

Writing 'Hoop Roots' was a substitute or a surrogate activity. I can't play anymore - my body won't cooperate - so in the writing of the book, I was looking to tell a good story about my life and about basketball, but I was also looking to entertain myself the way that I entertain myself when I play. — John Edgar Wideman

I feel compelled not to pass on a vision of bleakness, destruction or cynicism. I want to tell the truth as I see it, but I also have to believe that individuals - my kids, your kids, whoever - can do something about it, and I want to show the ways in which they can do something about it. — John Edgar Wideman

All my life, I've been very aware of my body. I have always used it as a gauge of things. When I look at a person, and I see their body, that's the beginning of knowledge about them. Furthermore, I respect the body. — John Edgar Wideman