7 Quotes & Sayings By John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman was born in Washington, D.C. He attended Howard University for his undergraduate studies, earning a B.A., M.A., and an M.Ed. in English literature. Wideman completed his doctoral degree at the University of Chicago, then taught at Virginia State University and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion for ten years Read more

He currently resides in Columbia, South Carolina and is a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and an adjunct professor at the Medical University of South Carolina. He published his first novel, Nil by Mouth, in 1989 and more than fifty books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art criticism since then.

1
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
2
Thank you, Jesus, for blindness that every once in a great while allows one of us to hit the target. John Edgar Wideman
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All Stories are True. John Edgar Wideman
4
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
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I always liked to write and had fun writing, but I didn't have any pretensions about being a writer. I liked to read and liked to putz around and write little stories or poems, but my thing was sports. John Edgar Wideman
6
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