Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Edgar Wideman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: June 14
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Maybe
Feeling
Feelings
Tell
Truth
Everything
Whole
Reader

More quotes by John Edgar Wideman

Image
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
Image
There is no American history. There is no French history. There is no John Wideman. There are all these dreams that are floating around. People construct them and fight with them and criticize them, and the world goes on. I don't think the stars pay much attention.
John Edgar Wideman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
John Edgar Wideman
Image
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
Image
I get off on anticipating and waiting much more than I get off on the actual event.
John Edgar Wideman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Things seem to fall apart inevitably.
John Edgar Wideman
Image
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
Image
Hell, I'm going to play pro basketball. I'm going to maybe be famous. I'm going to write books.
John Edgar Wideman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?
John Edgar Wideman
Image
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
Image
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