John Edgar Wideman Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
I don't see myself as ever being like anybody else.
-
With every bathroom renovation, there are three areas that I focus on: budget, function and style.
-
This field is not necessarily glamorous, nor does it often produce immediate results, but it seeks to increase our basic understanding of living processes.
-
There is no point in pointing fingers because there are three fingers pointing back at you.
-
You don't actually have control of the position people want you to be in. If they say, 'You king of the blacks,' you're king of the blacks - whether you like it or not.
-
Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.
-
Sometimes it takes dealing with a disability - the trauma, the relearning, the months of rehabilitation therapy - to uncover our true abilities and how we can put them to work for us in ways we may have never imagined.
-
And if you don't have your ears open, you're not going to be able to figure out what you should be doing.
-
I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.
-
In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her.
-
Americanism demands loyalty to the teacher and respect for his lesson.
-
I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.
-
I know it's a cliche, but I see myself as a citizen of the world. I was brought up in Switzerland by German and Turkish parents but I've very much grown up in San Francisco. I have a European sense of aesthetic, but I'm also deeply steeped in the notion of change and entrepreneurship that is associated with Silicon Valley.
-
To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.
-
I started performing opera when I was 10 years old. I didn't perform as Zola Jesus until I was probably 18.
-
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
-
Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
-
In God's world there are no majorities, no minorities; one, on God's side, is a majority.
-
I kind of romanticized what it was like to be a writer and director when I was in my early twenties. Working as a production assistant knocked that right out of me.
-
New York seems to be thriving, which I'm grateful for. But I would hope that they would figure out how to negotiate the traffic and limit the pedicabs, because it seems to me that it's becoming a more chaotic city.
-
I'm one of the few directors that actually shoots a lot in camera.
-
My first published novel was 'Mother of Demons,' which is simply 'The High Crusade' standing on its head. Poul Anderson placed his medieval human heroes in a futuristic alien setting; I placed my futuristic human heroes in a bronze age alien setting.
-
I fear very much that, in fact, government of the people, by the people and for the people is beginning to perish in America.
-
Books were my Internet, my TV, my movies all rolled into one.
