Top 30 John Edgar Wideman Quotes

I wish I had time to listen to music more.

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.

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 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.

In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.

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.

What basketball expresses is what jazz expresses. Certain cultural predispositions to make art. All African-American art has a substratum, or baseline, of improvisation and spontaneity. You find that in both basketball and jazz.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Real change is always violent, but it may hurt a lot less than what’s in place before the violence occurs.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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?