John Edgar Wideman Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that's kind of the mark of what a good writer is.
-
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.
-
God who created us has granted us the faculty of speech that we might disclose the counsels of our hearts to one another and that, since we possess our human nature in common, each of us might share his thoughts with his neighbor, bringing them forth from the secret recesses of the heart as from a treasury.
-
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.
-
I've always romanticized the late '40s and '50s - the cars, jazz, the open roads and lack of pollution. Now there are more vehicles, less hitchhikers, more billboards and power lines and stuff. People wrote wonderful long letters that took months to receive, and now everything is email.
-
I have a couple of girlfriends who've told me some horror stories but I've never had a really terrible kiss before.
-
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.
-
I was in a group called Wild Orchid and it just wasn't working. I wasn't being myself. What I should have done was say. 'Girls, it's really time for me to go on my own. I need to fulfill this dream of mine to have a solo album.' And I didn't know how to do that. I wanted to please them.
-
Keep it real by being straight forward. Don't pull no punches on people. It's better to tell somebody than just lollygag around, letting them think they're living their life the right way. Because some people don't know what the hell they're doing, they don't know if they're living the right way or making the right decisions. Some people don't know that.
-
There is no formula for winning any show. One just has to be at ease and mentally stable.
-
In my home, who is my boss? If you ask my wife she'll say certainly not her. She claims that she can't make me do anything and so she's not my boss. I am. I'm pretty sure, maybe.
-
Indeed, we might all forget where we have been if we didn't have somebody to assemble and arrange the little blocks called facts from which history is constructed, artfully or less so.
-
Books were my Internet, my TV, my movies all rolled into one.
