Quote

I'm not a fearful person, but I'm a pretty pessimistic person. So some of my best times are waiting, anticipating. That's the way it always has been with me, whether anticipating a ball game, anticipating a relationship.

John Edgar Wideman

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John Edgar Wideman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: June 14
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Person
Game
Way
Pretty
Always
Waiting
Anticipating
Games
Pessimistic
Whether
Fearful
Times
Ball
Persons
Balls
Best
Relationship

More quotes by John Edgar Wideman

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There are still horrible things that go on because of the myth of race, but we don't have to succumb totally.
John Edgar Wideman
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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
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As a reader, I do not like to have everything handed to me. Because after a while it gets formulaic and I'm thinking, If this is so thought through, then why do I need to read it. It's done! It becomes a beach book at a certain point.
John Edgar Wideman
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Hell, I'm going to play pro basketball. I'm going to maybe be famous. I'm going to write books.
John Edgar Wideman
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Things seem to fall apart inevitably.
John Edgar Wideman
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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.
John Edgar Wideman
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That's one of the beauties, I think, of African American life. There was this thing called slavery and adjustments were made. It literally destroyed millions, but it didn't destroy everybody and it didn't destroy the inner lives of all the people who experienced it.
John Edgar Wideman
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I really dislike when people talk about experimental, because any good writer is experimental. 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've been experimenting with these things myself in my own books.
John Edgar Wideman
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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.
John Edgar Wideman
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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.
John Edgar Wideman
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I don't tell everything. I want the reader to have the feeling that maybe they know the whole truth, but they don't.
John Edgar Wideman
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I had a deep prejudice against the South. It's taken me many years to get over that, be more open and thoughtful.
John Edgar Wideman
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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.
John Edgar Wideman
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My grandfather had asked me many times whether I'd like to come to South Carolina with him. He wanted to introduce me to our people down there and I didn't want to go. In those days, the South was still a place where black kids were lynched. Something horrible could happen to you. I've had that feeling my whole life.
John Edgar Wideman
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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
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I get off on anticipating and waiting much more than I get off on the actual event.
John Edgar Wideman
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I'm very hard-nosed and cold-blooded and I can walk past a drowning man. If I have someplace else to go, well, tough s**t. I could do that. I can. Have. Sometimes, not because I was callous but had to do it.
John Edgar Wideman
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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
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If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?
John Edgar Wideman
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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.
John Edgar Wideman