James McBride Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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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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When you glorify violence, then it comes back to bite you.
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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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I don't like a bunch of writers sitting around, puffing smoke, they like this book, he wrote this - tell me a dirty joke, you know. It's just not my style, I've never been that kind of person.
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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 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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Some writers like to go around talking about what they do all the time. I don't.
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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.
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I don't come from Lake Wobegon, and that world is not mine. It's not that funny to me. It's funny to other people, and I'm not judging it, but the world that I come from is not considered funny by other people as well. There's so much pain in it.
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The media's image of us is as animals, and we were never that to me. I knew love from black folks.
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When the great jazz and blues clubs closed - joints where the cash register rang loudly and there wasn't ESPN on TV over the bandstand, and people smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey and hollered 'Play on!' - When those places closed, I was pretty much done.
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If I grew up in a truly color-blind society, I would not be a black American.
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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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If you don't have humor, you're not going to make it. You're going to be one of those people who walks around with your head about to explode.
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There is a lot wrong with the church.
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I wasn't a guy built to write about entertainment.
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I don't do any art to please any people.
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I was in a special class in high school for truants. They made us stay together all day. Once a week, they would send us to a guidance counselor. He would sit me in his office and he would try to talk to me.
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You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.
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I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.