62 Quotes by John Edgar Wideman

In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.

I often want things to make definite statements. If I order onions sliced thinly on my hamburger, I don't want them to come out sort of medium. But that doesn't mean it's a reasonable desire, in all things.

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.

Home wasn't so much a house as people, family.

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.

I don't make that hard and fast distinction between political and nonpolitical writing. I write about what bothers me.

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.

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

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.