James McBride Quotes
-
Caring is beyond race. Either people care about you, or they don't.
-
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.
-
James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.
-
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.
-
I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.
-
Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.
-
I used to walk through the Old Times Square fearing for my life. Now I wouldn't be caught dead there.
-
I read more history books than anything else.
-
I'm hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?
-
If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.
-
I just love music, and I love what music does for people.
-
We're learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don't see themselves.
-
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.
-
Everybody knew James Brown. Every musician dreamed of being in his band.
-
The black church will accept anybody.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.