James McBride Quotes
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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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If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.
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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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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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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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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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People don't realize you're blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it's got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I'm home.
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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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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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There is a lot wrong with the church.
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Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.
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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 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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You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.
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Anyone can write your own life story.
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I wasn't a guy built to write about entertainment.
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I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.
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You have to be able to toss the thing out. You can't fall in love with your characters, and you have to know when to fight - and when to quit.
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When you glorify violence, then it comes back to bite you.
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It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.
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I don't do any art to please any people.
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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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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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Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.