James McBride Quotes
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I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.
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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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You can't live for literature. You can't live for the job.
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The black church will accept anybody.
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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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I read more history books than anything else.
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Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.
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As a writer, you have to be near people and hear stuff. I'm a hamburger and cheese kind of fellow; I'm not Henry David Thoreau.
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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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When you tell them you're a writer, they say, 'What have you written?' And then you've got to tell them what you've done. I don't ask a plumber what he does. Then I have to explain what I've done, and I haven't really, you know. I've just told some stories.
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A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don't see themselves.
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Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.
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I cannot recall any moment of clarity about becoming a writer. I always liked to read. That's what did it.
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I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.
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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'm trying to get Americans to see that we're all pretty much the same. I believe it; I was taught God doesn't have a color. I want to better the planet a little bit.
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As a journalist, the details always tell the story.
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I used to walk through the Old Times Square fearing for my life. Now I wouldn't be caught dead there.
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I have cousins in North Carolina who talk in that old Southern style of 'yakking,' if you will. All the black men in my life when I was a boy talked that way, and I love that kind of talk.
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Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.
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I'm proud of 'Miracle at St. Anna' and I loved it; there's no question in my mind it's as good as any movie that came out in 2007.
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When you're interviewing someone, even your mother - you have to sort of deal with you have to get some objective space from yourself and the person but you also have to find what's the best way to get the information from that person.
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My wife and kids like the quiet and the countryside - I still find that kind of quiet hard to listen to.
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I don't like living around too many fancy-pantsy folks. That ain't my thing. I'm not into phony people.