American - Writer | June 14, 1941 -
Home wasn't so much a house as people, family.
John Edgar Wideman
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I don't have anybody living around me who has much of a sense of what I do. That's exactly what I like.
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Seamless, careful, by-the-book performance provides no evidence of what the spider's thinking about the fly enmeshed in its web.
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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.
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Stories are told over time, and so they naturally accrue meanings.
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Books were my Internet, my TV, my movies all rolled into one.
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I think I was kind of melancholy as a kid. I spent a lot of time inside my own head, a lot of time sort of staring into space wondering the hell was going on.
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I call people by their initials when they're good buddies, and that's a kinda street thing, too - 'Here comes JF,' or, 'Here comes KC.' It's fun; it's intimate.
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My books are not about how it feels to be a black man. My books are about how it feels to be a human being, and part of what I'm trying to sort out is what we mean - what I mean, what you mean, what everybody in the culture means - when they say 'black man,' or they say 'white person.'
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The title of my book is 'American Histories,' plural. And as far as I'm concerned, my reading of history is it is a sort of nightmare. It is a sort of nightmare, and I'm trying to wake up from it. And as any nightmare, it's full of much that is unspeakable.
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How do you talk about the Holocaust? How do you talk about slavery? Probably the best thing to do is just be quiet and hide from it, forget about it. Except, then it jumps up and bites you. Because it's there.
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I assume the risk of allowing my fiction to enter other people's true stories. And to be fair, I let other people's stories trespass the truth of mine.
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