John Edgar Wideman (born June 14, 1941) is an American writer, professor emeritus at Brown University, and sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.
Things seem to fall apart inevitably.
If I had only a negative side of things to present, I think I would have much less of a drive to do it. Because what would be the point?
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.
I really love James Joyce, Dubliners and other work. And I was interested in the way the dash was used in English topography - in his work particularly - and I realized there was no compulsion to use those ugly dot-dot curlicues all over the place to designate dialogue. I began to look around, and found writers who could make transitions quite clear by the language itself. I'm a bit of a maverick now. I'm always trying to push the medium.
If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?
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.
There are still horrible things that go on because of the myth of race, but we don't have to succumb totally.
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.
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.
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.
As a reader, I do not like to have everything handed to me. Because after a while it gets formulaic and I'm thinking, "If this is so thought through, then why do I need to read it. It's done!" It becomes a beach book at a certain point.
I get off on anticipating and waiting much more than I get off on the actual event.
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.
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.
I had a deep prejudice against the South. It's taken me many years to get over that, be more open and thoughtful.
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.
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.
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.
As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.
I don't like the way question marks look. They're really ugly. They look like blots. At some other point in my life, I might have disliked them because I never knew how to properly apply them. Also commas, and whether they were outside the quote or inside the quote - that all seemed like an unnecessary pain in the ass.