Top 26 John Edgar Wideman Quotes
#1. Real change is always violent, but it may hurt a lot less than what's in place before the violence occurs.
John Edgar Wideman
#2. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I don't make that hard and fast distinction between political and nonpolitical writing. I write about what bothers me.
John Edgar Wideman
#18. 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
#19. If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?
John Edgar Wideman
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. Looking at each other like, What the fuck's going on here? We big-time undercover supercops.
John Edgar Wideman
#25. 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
#26. Thank you, Jesus, for blindness that every once in a great while allows one of us to hit the target.
John Edgar Wideman
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