I don’t understand why black people have been so quiescent, so passive over the hundreds of years of American history. Why hasn’t there been more violence, more armed struggle? I know answers to some of that, but it seems to me it’s an issue of faith, an abiding faith in some sort of great beyond, or great spirit, or even in the American dream. John Edgar Wideman Read Quote
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. John Edgar Wideman Read Quote
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. John Edgar Wideman Read Quote
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. John Edgar Wideman Read Quote
My aunt Geraldine was the unofficial historian and storyteller. She had all the information about family members and the gossip that came out of the church because we were very much part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. At family gatherings, the older folk had the floor, had pride of place, and it was their stories I remember. John Edgar Wideman Read Quote
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. John Edgar Wideman Read Quote
