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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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John Edgar Wideman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: June 14
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Myth
Horrible
Totally
Race
Stills
Still
Things
Succumb

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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.
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Things seem to fall apart inevitably.
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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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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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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'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.
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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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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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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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I believe - what did Faulkner say? The past is not even past.
John Edgar Wideman
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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
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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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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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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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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 get off on anticipating and waiting much more than I get off on the actual event.
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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 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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When I'm writing, I'm thinking, Well, this might be a book that I'll always be happy with, and certainly readers will be happy with. But another part of me knows that when I'm past the stage of writing, the book is gonna have good things about it, bad things about it - probably more bad than good. I just know that. That's who I am.
John Edgar Wideman