James McBride Quotes
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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 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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As a journalist, the details always tell the story.
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If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.
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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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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 used to walk through the Old Times Square fearing for my life. Now I wouldn't be caught dead there.
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We're learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.
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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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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 think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.
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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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I read more history books than anything else.
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Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.
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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'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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I just love music, and I love what music does for people.
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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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The black church will accept anybody.
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Everybody knew James Brown. Every musician dreamed of being in his band.
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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'm hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?
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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.
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We would not have been a successful family without my father and stepfather, who were working-class men with better dreams for their children. We just wore them out.