James McBride Quotes
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Atticus Finch is, you know, he was just his whole - the business of his modesty and his ability to see tomorrow and to try to buttress his knowledge of what was coming for his kids was something that I'll never - as a father I'm not able to do.
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I'm hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?
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I just love music, and I love what music does for people.
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I read more history books than anything else.
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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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Everybody knew James Brown. Every musician dreamed of being in his band.
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We're learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.
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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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Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.
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A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don't see themselves.
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Caring is beyond race. Either people care about you, or they don't.
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If you can whistle the melody, then the song will stick. But if you need a bunch of machines to make it sound good, you're probably not writing anything that's going to last a long time.
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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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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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The black church will accept anybody.
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People process pain differently. My family, we were pretty humorous about things that went on.
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Some writers like to go around talking about what they do all the time. I don't.
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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.
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The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.
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We don't know who John Brown was, and in many ways, his work shaped where we are today. He was a Pennsylvanian. He was the prototypical Yankee who fought back and suffered in doing so.
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I grew up in a house with a lot of kids, brothers and sisters. So I don't mind a lot of talking, yelling, playing. I can tune most of that out.
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If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.
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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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You can play Mozart all you want and pretend that it gives you class, but what is class, you know? Class is a bus driver on the M103 who gets off the bus to help somebody on board even though he's tired, he's exhausted, and he's two months behind on his mortgage. That's real class.