John Edgar Wideman Quotes

To reach out to you when I'm in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you.

Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

This overload is edging me further out to sea, I need to put some distances between overkill and me.

I try to conceal art with art.

I squeeze my eyes shut and try to reach for him across the hundreds and hundreds of miles, to send my thoughts into his mind, to let him know he is not alone. But he is. And I can't help him.

Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.

Immigration confuses and terrifies me, so why not try to write a comic and make some sense of it?

An instrument that sometimes expresses thought, sometimes obscures thought, but most often replaces thought.

Understanding like the eye; whilst it makes us see and perceive all things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own subject.

if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something.

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not adistance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,--nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.

My art, what do you want to say about it? Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who do not see them? . . . I can find the best and clearest words to explain my meaning, and I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art, and they have not understood; but among people who understand, words are not necessary, you say humph, he, ha and everything has been said.

All art is someone trying to tell you something.

The movies that I do are in love with cinema, and I try to show that I am in love with cinema. I want them to be, in other ways, drinking from other sources.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

It seems to me that when I see nature I see it ready-made, completely written - but then, try to do it!

What is the universe? Is it a great 3D movie in which we are the unwilling actors? Is it a cosmic joke, a giant computer, a work of art by a Supreme Being or simply an experiment? The problem in trying to understand the universe is that we have nothing to compare it to.

From film to film, I realize my strengths and my weakness, and I realize how much better I get. I learn the lingo, I ask questions and I'm on set trying to figure out which shots they're going to use. For me, it's exploring the art. It's not just making a movie.

I would like to perfect the art of being studiously aloof

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.

All the lousy little poets coming around trying to sound like Charles Manson.

The foreground in a picture is always unattractive... Art demands that the interest of the canvas should be placed in the far distance, where lies take refuge, those dreams which blossom out of fact and are man's only love.