For a young person, anybody who's sorting out and trying to make a life for himself or herself, to have the opportunity each day to set down - sit down and then set down thoughts, words - it's a crucial, crucial way of staying alive, of not allowing yourself and not allowing the culture outside yourself to totally dominate your life.

John Edgar Wideman

Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.

John Edgar Wideman

dream enemy fall

That split is inside all Americans. There are contradictions inside all of us about color and race. We've learned to cover them up and live with them and pretend that deep cleavage is not there. We all bear that illness.

John Edgar Wideman

splits color race

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.

John Edgar Wideman

eye artist reality

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. 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. That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is. There is no American or Frenchhistory. There are all these dreams that are floating around. People construct them and fight with them and criticize them, and the world goes on. I don't think the stars pay much attention.

John Edgar Wideman

distance fighting dream

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

John Edgar Wideman

doing-you hell work-out

When it's played the way is supposed 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.

John Edgar Wideman

basketball air dream

I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains.

John Edgar Wideman

writing book thinking

That's one of the beauties, I think, of African American life. There was this thing called slavery and adjustments were made. It literally destroyed millions, but it didn't destroy everybody and it didn't destroy the inner lives of all the people who experienced it.

John Edgar Wideman

african-american people thinking

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.

John Edgar Wideman

wall kids children

There's something human that has to do with time and space and being who I am that is in progress and always will be in progress. And who I am, on different days, different moments, depends on different aspects of my past.

John Edgar Wideman

progress different past

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.

John Edgar Wideman

superhero color men

Remember that a book is many drafts - mine certainly are. It's improvisation. It's as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing.

John Edgar Wideman

writing book people

I had a deep prejudice against the South. It's taken me many years to get over that, be more open and thoughtful.

John Edgar Wideman

thoughtful taken years

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

John Edgar Wideman

scary important writing

When I'm writing, I'm thinking, "Well, this might be a book that I'll always be happy with, and certainly readers will be happy with." But another part of me knows that when I'm past the stage of writing, the book is gonna have good things about it, bad things about it - probably more bad than good. I just know that. That's who I am.

John Edgar Wideman

writing book past

When you're at the basketball court watching a game, one person may be talking about a fight he had with his wife, another is talking about the last hard-on he got, someone else is talking about the presidential election. The language and the tone and the voice - I'd love to be able to capture that spontaneity.

John Edgar Wideman

fighting basketball talking

As a reader, I do not like to have everything handed to me. Because after a while it gets formulaic and I'm thinking, "If this is so thought through, then why do I need to read it. It's done!" It becomes a beach book at a certain point.

John Edgar Wideman

beach book thinking

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.

John Edgar Wideman

lessons might children

I'm not a fearful person, but I'm a pretty pessimistic person. So some of my best times are waiting, anticipating. That's the way it always has been with me, whether anticipating a ball game, anticipating a relationship.

John Edgar Wideman

pessimistic games waiting

I really love James Joyce, Dubliners and other work. And I was interested in the way the dash was used in English topography - in his work particularly - and I realized there was no compulsion to use those ugly dot-dot curlicues all over the place to designate dialogue. I began to look around, and found writers who could make transitions quite clear by the language itself. I'm a bit of a maverick now. I'm always trying to push the medium.

John Edgar Wideman

topography always-trying transition