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