Quotes from John Edgar Wideman

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To be a survivor as an African American man - maybe any man - you have to be pretty tough. Or at least that's what we all understand.

I really dislike it when people talk about "experimental," because any good writer is experimental.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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?

I wish I had time to listen to music more.

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 it's played the way is spozed 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.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

All Stories are True.