John Edgar Wideman Quotes

Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.

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.

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

I had a deep prejudice against the South. It's taken me many years to get over that, be more open and thoughtful.

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

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.

You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that's kind of exacerbated for men of color.

All Stories are True.

Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious.

Hell, I'm going to play pro basketball. I'm going to maybe be famous. I'm going to write books.

There are still horrible things that go on because of the myth of race, but we don't have to succumb totally.

To be a survivor as an African American man - maybe any man - you have to be pretty tough. Or at least that's what we all understand.

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there's always that gap.

We're dreamers and - since we only have one life, and if we screw up we can get in a world of trouble - we're very intense dreamers.

I want to give the evidence in a way that is convincing, but I don't want to cheat.

I'm still vulnerable and still weak.

I can't pretend that I did one really awful thing - I took a bite out of the apple but now I'm never going to sin again.

Things seem to fall apart inevitably.

I really dislike it when people talk about "experimental," because any good writer is experimental.

My father combined many of the elements that were feared in the culture, but also he was a warm figure, a figure we needed. We depended on him to give us a little bit of strength and courage.

My mother loved my father. From my view, she let him get away with too much. It broke my heart to see him in an old people's home and stop being strong and lose his voice.

If I had only a negative side of things to present, I think I would have much less of a drive to do it. Because what would be the point?

I get off on anticipating and waiting much more than I get off on the actual event.

I don't tell everything. I want the reader to have the feeling that maybe they know the whole truth, but they don't.

Remember that a book is many drafts - mine certainly are. It's improvisation. It's as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing.

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

That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."

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