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Things seem to fall apart inevitably.

John Edgar Wideman

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John Edgar Wideman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: June 14
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Things
Inevitably
Apart
Seem
Fall
Seems

More quotes by 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.
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There's something human that has to do with time and space and being who I am that is in progress and always will be in progress. And who I am, on different days, different moments, depends on different aspects of my past.
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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.
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Everything is up for grabs, everything is relative. Except nothing is if you are serious about it because the moment you become serious about answering a question you have a stake in it. Relatively goes out of the window, in one sense because you're putting your a** out there - you are depending on the answer, you need the answer.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
John Edgar Wideman
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The hardship, the pain, the suffering of my brother and my son in prison, that's absolutely their experience, that's not mine. I don't get any credit for enduring that. I never give myself any credit for enduring that.
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If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?
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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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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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When you're at the basketball court watching a game, one person may be talking about a fight he had with his wife, another is talking about the last hard-on he got, someone else is talking about the presidential election. The language and the tone and the voice - I'd love to be able to capture that spontaneity.
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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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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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.
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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.
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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
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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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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