James McBride Quotes
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I'm not interested in food. It's just fuel.
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The hard part about writing about a guy like John Brown is that he was so serious, and his cause was so serious, that most of what's been written about him is really serious and, in my opinion, a little bit boring.
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John Brown was clearly flawed in real life. He did some terrible things, but he did some things none of us would have had the heart to do. His moral leanings were unquestionably admirable.
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The abolitionists were not like the rugged people out West, and they were not like John Brown, either. They were people who made speeches and did politics.
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A lot of mixed-race stories are these navel-gazing, horrible accounts of mulatto tragedy.
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People process pain differently. My family, we were pretty humorous about things that went on.
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I type most of my books for the first chapter or two - I use a manual typewriter for the first 50 pages or so - and then I move to the computer. It helps me keep the work lean so I don't end up spending 10 pages describing a leaf.
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My main problem with fiction is that once my characters get moving, you just have to follow them along and get out of the way of the story, but sometimes they pull me in too many directions, and I need to focus.
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I love the language of, you know, the old black country man with a blues guitar and... boots and the quick banter.
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I split my time between a small town in New Jersey and New York City.
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Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn't really help me understand a person.
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Caring is beyond race. Either people care about you, or they don't.
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Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
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Being a best-selling author doesn't make you a millionaire. It's not like Stephen King.
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Don't get me started on Americans and war. One of the things I learnt over in Italy is how they mythologised the war so that it's all good old gung-ho guys from Omaha and ignored everyone else's role.
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James Brown's music still sounds as fresh and as good and as new as it did when he first created it.
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The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.
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The James Brown story is not about James Brown. It's about who's getting paid, whose interest is involved, who can squeeze the estate and black history for more.
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I'm not one of those who can listen to music and write. I need the door closed. Windows shut. Facing the wall. No birds tweeting, views of nature, and so forth.
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All of us want to be Superman when we grow up, fighting for truth and justice. That's part of what drives me as a writer.
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James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.
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If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.
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You can't live for literature. You can't live for the job.
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I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.