John Edgar Wideman

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

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

— John Edgar Wideman

For African-American people, I am in the business of inventing a reality that gives a different perspective - on history, on crime,…

— John Edgar Wideman

I always liked to write and had fun writing, but I didn't have any pretensions about being a writer. I liked to…

— John Edgar Wideman

I try to cope by doing what I do, what I find purpose and joy in. For me, that has been writing…

— John Edgar Wideman

If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?

— John Edgar Wideman

“I wonder how far away it is somebody should know somebody should find out and tell people cause I’m sure they want…

— John Edgar Wideman

I assume the risk of allowing my fiction to enter other people's true stories. And to be fair, I let other people's…

— John Edgar Wideman

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We're dreamers and - since we only…

— John Edgar Wideman

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…

— John Edgar Wideman

How do you talk about the Holocaust? How do you talk about slavery? Probably the best thing to do is just be…

— John Edgar Wideman

I can't pretend that I did one really awful thing - I took a bite out of the apple but now I'm…

— John Edgar Wideman

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

— John Edgar Wideman

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be…

— John Edgar Wideman

I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."

— John Edgar Wideman

To be a survivor as an African American man - maybe any man - you have to be pretty tough. Or at…

— John Edgar Wideman

“Professor of Comparative Literature, B.A. Harvard. Ph.D. Sorbonne, Oxford. Somewhere certificates pasted in full-of-truth blue book. At points we diverge, essential points…

— John Edgar Wideman