James McBride Quotes
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You can't live for literature. You can't live for the job.
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It would be nice if we redefined what we meant by 'war story.' If you're making $15,000 a year living in a certain area of Portland, trying to make it with three kids and no husband, that's a kind of war.
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I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.
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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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Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.
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I read more history books than anything else.
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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 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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The black church will accept anybody.
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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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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 think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.
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A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don't see themselves.
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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'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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Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.
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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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Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.
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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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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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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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I'd like to do something involving jazz. But books are how I earn my living, and I'd like to stay with the horse I rode in on.