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

John Edgar Wideman

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John Edgar Wideman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: June 14
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Faulkner
Past
Even
Believe

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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
John Edgar Wideman
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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Things seem to fall apart inevitably.
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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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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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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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