Explore Quotes by John Edgar Wideman

My father was a veteran. He fought in World War II. He was a patriot. On the other hand, he had no illusions whatsoever about how Uncle Sam had mistreated him and other black soldiers.

I try to cope by doing what I do, what I find purpose and joy in. For me, that has been writing and playing ball. It doesn't make the pain go away, but what else can I do?

That's what writing is: it's imagining that you can make a world. That's what basketball is, too: it's imagining the game as a world.

A lot of people think the best work I've done was nonfiction - the 'Brothers and Keepers' book. But I think of myself as a fiction writer. And I think, if my work is put in perspective, all the books would be a continual questioning of what's true and what's not true, what's documented and what's not documented.

My father was intelligent and closed-mouthed. He knew a lot more than what he was ever going to tell you.

I assume the risk of allowing my fiction to enter other people's true stories. And to be fair, I let other people's stories trespass the truth of mine.

The title of my book is 'American Histories,' plural. And as far as I'm concerned, my reading of history is it is a sort of nightmare. It is a sort of nightmare, and I'm trying to wake up from it. And as any nightmare, it's full of much that is unspeakable.

Stories are told over time, and so they naturally accrue meanings.

I don't have anybody living around me who has much of a sense of what I do. That's exactly what I like.

For African-American people, I am in the business of inventing a reality that gives a different perspective - on history, on crime, on art, on love.

I write what I want to write, and then, when it's finished, I use my judgment to see whether or not I think it's intrusive. If it is problematic, then I ask those involved. I won't necessarily do what they say. But I do consult. I haven't had too many problems. Nobody's really gotten angry at me. Nobody, as far as I know, has felt betrayed.

When I wake up in the morning, I need the writing to go to. I begin there. And that's not an accident, I mean, that habit of getting up in the morning and going to my writing first thing.

My mother was a reader; my father was a reader. Not anything particularly sophisticated. My mother read fat historical or romantic novels; my father liked to read Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of stuff. Whatever they brought in, I read.

My aunt Geraldine was the unofficial historian and storyteller. She had all the information about family members and the gossip that came out of the church because we were very much part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. At family gatherings, the older folk had the floor, had pride of place, and it was their stories I remember.

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips, teaches us to perceive reality differently.

I often want things to make definite statements. If I order onions sliced thinly on my hamburger, I don't want them to come out sort of medium. But that doesn't mean it's a reasonable desire, in all things.

Silence marks time, saturates and shapes African-American art. Silences structure our music, fill the spaces - point, counterpoint - of rhythm, cadence, phrasing.

My books are not about how it feels to be a black man. My books are about how it feels to be a human being, and part of what I'm trying to sort out is what we mean - what I mean, what you mean, what everybody in the culture means - when they say 'black man,' or they say 'white person.'

I think I was kind of melancholy as a kid. I spent a lot of time inside my own head, a lot of time sort of staring into space wondering the hell was going on.

I lived with my mother and father and brothers and sisters some of the time; some of the time, my mother and father were feuding, so my mother would take us to live in my grandmother's house.

Home wasn't so much a house as people, family.