That split is inside all Americans. There are contradictions inside all of us about color and race. We've learned to cover them up and live with them…

- John Edgar Wideman

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We're dreamers and - since we only have one life, and …

- John Edgar Wideman

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 oppr…

- John Edgar Wideman

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…

- John Edgar Wideman

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

- John Edgar Wideman

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

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…

- John Edgar Wideman

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

- John Edgar Wideman

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