James McBride Quotes
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You make your own luck by working hard, you know?
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Be a member of the human race. Love somebody. Change the world.
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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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I split my time between a small town in New Jersey and New York City.
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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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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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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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The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.
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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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People process pain differently. My family, we were pretty humorous about things that went on.
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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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I'm not interested in food. It's just fuel.
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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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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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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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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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I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.
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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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You can't live for literature. You can't live for the job.
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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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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 go through periods listening to specific types of music. Because I'm a musician, listening to music is... it's a bit like work for me. A little bit.
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I hate to sound blase about it, but literary status is not important to me. Being happy is important to me.
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As a journalist, the details always tell the story.