“If you meet your heroes, you’re always going to be disappointed. Frederick Douglass was a great man, but would I want my daughter to marry him? Probably not. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think he’s a great man.”
― James McBride
“I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“People call him a terrorist, but you can use language to do many things and say many things about people, but John Brown was a hero.”
― James McBride
“I type most of my books for the first chapter or two – I use a manual typewriter for the first 50 pages or so – and then I move to the computer. It helps me keep the work lean so I don’t end up spending 10 pages describing a leaf.”
― James McBride
“Anyone can write your own life story.”
― James McBride
“I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“I used to walk through the Old Times Square fearing for my life. Now I wouldn’t be caught dead there.”
― James McBride
“Every time I see something about the Wild West, I’m reminded that our version of history may not be what really happened.”
― James McBride
“I just don’t see the point in sitting around hollering the blues over things you have no control over. It’s all in God’s hands.”
― James McBride
“As a journalist, the details always tell the story.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.”
― James McBride
“If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.”
― James McBride
“Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.”
― James McBride
“I’m not interested in food. It’s just fuel.”
― James McBride
“My family is my career.”
― James McBride
“Be kind to the living.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“I wish all critics, no matter their color, were more sophisticated when it comes to the moral questions a film like ‘St. Anna’ is trying to raise.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he’s a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he’s a novel.”
― James McBride
“Until you expose the cancer, you can’t fix it.”
― James McBride
“The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don’t want to touch.”
― James McBride
“The black church will accept anybody.”
― James McBride
“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 McBride
“Don’t get me started on Americans and war. One of the things I learnt over in Italy is how they mythologised the war so that it’s all good old gung-ho guys from Omaha and ignored everyone else’s role.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“People process pain differently. My family, we were pretty humorous about things that went on.”
― James McBride
“I read more history books than anything else.”
― James McBride
“I’m not one of those who can listen to music and write. I need the door closed. Windows shut. Facing the wall. No birds tweeting, views of nature, and so forth.”
― James McBride
“You can’t write just anything. Your story needs structure.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“I can’t be a creative person if I’m a celebrity.”
― James McBride
“The hard part about writing about a guy like John Brown is that he was so serious, and his cause was so serious, that most of what’s been written about him is really serious and, in my opinion, a little bit boring.”
― James McBride
“I love the language of, you know, the old black country man with a blues guitar and… boots and the quick banter.”
― James McBride
“The abolitionists were not like the rugged people out West, and they were not like John Brown, either. They were people who made speeches and did politics.”
― James McBride
“James Brown was the Monday-to-Friday guy. He was the hardest man in show business. He was like your dad and your uncle: He showed up, and he hit hard.”
― James McBride
“James Brown’s music still sounds as fresh and as good and as new as it did when he first created it.”
― James McBride
“A band is not a democracy: It’s show business.”
― James McBride
“Writing teaches writing.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“My main problem with fiction is that once my characters get moving, you just have to follow them along and get out of the way of the story, but sometimes they pull me in too many directions, and I need to focus.”
― James McBride
“I split my time between a small town in New Jersey and New York City.”
― James McBride
“Most of my work is done when everyone else is asleep.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“I don’t want to read a book that’s depressing.”
― James McBride
“Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.”
― James McBride
“You can’t live for literature. You can’t live for the job.”
― James McBride
“I don’t live for my work. My life is my life. That’s more important, and I think that helps my work.”
― James McBride
“All of us want to be Superman when we grow up, fighting for truth and justice. That’s part of what drives me as a writer.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“Spike Lee listens a lot. He’s one of the quietest creative people I’ve ever met.”
― James McBride
“Everybody knew James Brown. Every musician dreamed of being in his band.”
― James McBride
“I cannot recall any moment of clarity about becoming a writer. I always liked to read. That’s what did it.”
― James McBride
“As far as making a living, if plumbing earned more, I’d probably do it. At least you can leave the job at home once the tools are put away. A writer works in his mind 24/7.”
― James McBride
“We’re learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“My wife and kids like the quiet and the countryside – I still find that kind of quiet hard to listen to.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“I like stories where normal people are in abnormal situations, and that’s what appeals to me about history.”
― James McBride
“I write stories that are already in the air, and I think it’s important to have the correct listening device to tune in to that frequency.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“John Brown was the abolitionist to end all abolitionists. People thought he was crazy. He was like John Coltrane playing free jazz, exhausting all possibilities in his approach to harmony and improvisation.”
― James McBride
“James Brown’s life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.”
― James McBride
“Being a best-selling author doesn’t make you a millionaire. It’s not like Stephen King.”
― James McBride
“You make your own luck by working hard, you know?”
― James McBride
“I hate to sound blase about it, but literary status is not important to me. Being happy is important to me.”
― James McBride
“Some writers like to go around talking about what they do all the time. I don’t.”
― James McBride
“I don’t like living around too many fancy-pantsy folks. That ain’t my thing. I’m not into phony people.”
― James McBride
“Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.”
― James McBride
“A daily dose of Nietzsche goes a long way.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“Be a member of the human race. Love somebody. Change the world.”
― James McBride
“John Brown was clearly flawed in real life. He did some terrible things, but he did some things none of us would have had the heart to do. His moral leanings were unquestionably admirable.”
― James McBride
“The whole notion of owning a person is so ludicrous, there’s plenty of room to make fun.”
― James McBride
“I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.”
― James McBride
“I wasn’t a guy built to write about entertainment.”
― James McBride
“I just love music, and I love what music does for people.”
― James McBride
“When I was younger, I was ambitious. Now I’m not ambitious anymore. I just want to be happy. Does that make sense?”
― James McBride
“My goal is to be able to fill out one of those forms that asks ‘Who are you?’ and be able to just put ‘Human being,’ you know?”
― James McBride
“Essentially, I’m a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.”
― James McBride
“A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don’t see themselves.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“The James Brown story is not about James Brown. It’s about who’s getting paid, whose interest is involved, who can squeeze the estate and black history for more.”
― James McBride
“Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn’t really help me understand a person.”
― James McBride
“When we’re talking about slavery… we’re really talking about the web of relationships that exists between whites and blacks from 1619 to 1865 to now.”
― James McBride
“A typewriter forces you to keep going, to march forward.”
― James McBride
“I’m not one of those deeper, ethereal writers. I’m just trying to get it done.”
― James McBride
“I’m hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?”
― James McBride
“The media’s image of us is as animals, and we were never that to me. I knew love from black folks.”
― James McBride
“I don’t do any art to please any people.”
― James McBride
“My mother tried her best to give us a sense of self-esteem.”
― James McBride
“When you glorify violence, then it comes back to bite you.”
― James McBride
“There is a lot wrong with the church.”
― James McBride
“When I was coming up, a lot of serious jazz players couldn’t stand funk.”
― James McBride
“A lot of mixed-race stories are these navel-gazing, horrible accounts of mulatto tragedy.”
― James McBride
“I think what makes his story unique from others is there is not really one piece of American pop music you hear today that does not have some James Brown in it.”
― James McBride
“When you study history in American schools, very rarely is the name John Brown mentioned. We know who Kanye West is or Twyla Tharp or Shania Twain.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“Caring is beyond race. Either people care about you, or they don’t.”
― James McBride
“If I grew up in a truly color-blind society, I would not be a black American.”
― James McBride
“When my mother left home, her family sat shivah for her, more because my father was not Jewish than because he was black.”
― James McBride
“My father died in 1957, just before I was born. My mother went to her Jewish aunt, who slammed the door in her face.”
― James McBride
“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.”
― James McBride
“I understand it’s great to read a great book, but it’s better to live your life. It just helps me. It’s uncomfortable at times, but you have to live outside the circle.”
― James McBride
“I think only now am I at the age where I’ve forgiven the past enough to say, ‘You know what? Slavery was there. Let’s talk about it in ways that will help us face tomorrow.”
― James McBride
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