Explore Quotes by John Edgar Wideman

All my life, I've been very aware of my body. I have always used it as a gauge of things. When I look at a person, and I see their body, that's the beginning of knowledge about them. Furthermore, I respect the body.

I don't make that hard and fast distinction between political and nonpolitical writing. I write about what bothers me.

I don't understand why black people have been so quiescent, so passive over the hundreds of years of American history. Why hasn't there been more violence, more armed struggle? I know answers to some of that, but it seems to me it's an issue of faith, an abiding faith in some sort of great beyond, or great spirit, or even in the American dream.

The primary thing writing and basketball share is the sense that each time you go out, each time you play or begin a piece, it's a new day. You can score 40 points one game, but the next game, those points don't count. You can win the Nobel Literature Prize, but that doesn't make the next sentence of the next book appear.

My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.

For a young person, anybody who's sorting out and trying to make a life for himself or herself, to have the opportunity each day to set down - sit down and then set down thoughts, words - it's a crucial, crucial way of staying alive, of not allowing yourself and not allowing the culture outside yourself to totally dominate your life.

That's been my routine for years and years... Up early before everybody else, before I get connected, before I get bugged, before I have obligations. Get the writing done first, then be the person I want to be in other ways after that.

Too much is made for us; too much is given to us - even those of us who are underprivileged. The poverty is given to us. The difficulties are given to us.

What I wanted to do in talking about basketball in 'Hoop Roots' was retrieve the game as something to participate in, not to watch.

Basketball can give us a kind of mystical awareness. Everything seems focused and in balance.

The whole idea of spellbinding, of being an entertainer, being the center of the stage, making up words - that let me know that writing is nice.

When I'm doing the brute work, I do it early in the morning; that's the best time for me to get the stuff down on the page.

How do you talk about the Holocaust? How do you talk about slavery? Probably the best thing to do is just be quiet and hide from it, forget about it. Except, then it jumps up and bites you. Because it's there.

I call people by their initials when they're good buddies, and that's a kinda street thing, too - 'Here comes JF,' or, 'Here comes KC.' It's fun; it's intimate.

Books were my Internet, my TV, my movies all rolled into one.

Seamless, careful, by-the-book performance provides no evidence of what the spider's thinking about the fly enmeshed in its web.

I have written about the women around me. My ancestors, my relatives, lovers. It was a way of trying to make it all make sense.

Writers transform: they throw a hand grenade into the notion of reality that people carry around in their heads. That's very dangerous, very destructive, but not to do it means you are satisfied with the status quo - and that's a kind of danger as well, because a kind of violence is already being perpetuated.

I feel compelled not to pass on a vision of bleakness, destruction or cynicism. I want to tell the truth as I see it, but I also have to believe that individuals - my kids, your kids, whoever - can do something about it, and I want to show the ways in which they can do something about it.

Writing 'Hoop Roots' was a substitute or a surrogate activity. I can't play anymore - my body won't cooperate - so in the writing of the book, I was looking to tell a good story about my life and about basketball, but I was also looking to entertain myself the way that I entertain myself when I play.

I always liked to write and had fun writing, but I didn't have any pretensions about being a writer. I liked to read and liked to putz around and write little stories or poems, but my thing was sports.