Quotes from John Edgar Wideman

Paradise Lost is a poem. The old, blind bastard's trying to sing to you. Listen, as the Isley Brothers say, to the music. You must learn to do that before you can expect to understand. Slowly. Slowly. A few licks at a time.

Thank you, Jesus, for blindness that every once in a great while allows one of us to hit the target.

Looking at each other like, What the fuck's going on here? We big-time undercover supercops.

They beat me, and fucked me in every hole I had. I was their whore. Their maid. A stool they stood on when they wanted to reach a little higher. But I never sang in their cage, Bobby. Not one note.

Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.

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 differently.

One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.

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.

My father was intelligent and closed-mouthed. He knew a lot more than what he was ever going to tell you.

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

I think I was kind of melancholy as a kid. I spent a lot of time inside my own head, a lot of time sort of staring into space wondering the hell was going on.

The title of my book is 'American Histories,' plural. And as far as I'm concerned, my reading of history is it is a sort of nightmare. It is a sort of nightmare, and I'm trying to wake up from it. And as any nightmare, it's full of much that is unspeakable.

Trick about night is it changes things but you can't see exactly how. You know the park is different, you feel it in your bones. Night air cools the skin, contours of the ground rise and fall in unfamiliar rhythms, spaces open which haven't been there before, the hollow loses its bottom, a black lap you'd sink into forever.

Wouldn't there be a long time when nobody'd know what was happening? Centuries out of kilter, askew, but no one understanding the problem. Just this queasiness, this uneasiness. This tilt and slow falling. You are in a city. You look up and can't see the stars and that doesn't bother you as much as it should. You don't know what's wrong but maybe more's wrong than you want to know.

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 think I was kind of melancholy as a kid. I spent a lot of time inside my own head, a lot of time sort of staring into space wondering the hell was going on.

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.

That's what writing is: it's imagining that you can make a world. That's what basketball is, too: it's imagining the game as a world.

I write what I want to write, and then, when it's finished, I use my judgment to see whether or not I think it's intrusive. If it is problematic, then I ask those involved. I won't necessarily do what they say. But I do consult. I haven't had too many problems. Nobody's really gotten angry at me. Nobody, as far as I know, has felt betrayed.

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.

My father was intelligent and closed-mouthed. He knew a lot more than what he was ever going to tell you.

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

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.

All Stories are True.