Top 163 Quotes & Sayings by James McBride - Page 2

Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn't really help me understand a person.

I'm hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?

Being a best-selling author doesn't make you a millionaire. It's not like Stephen King.

When my mother left home, her family sat shivah for her, more because my father was not Jewish than because he was black.

We're learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.

Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.

I don't like living around too many fancy-pantsy folks. That ain't my thing. I'm not into phony people.

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.

A daily dose of Nietzsche goes a long way.

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.

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.

There is a lot wrong with the church.

My mother tried her best to give us a sense of self-esteem.

I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.

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 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.

Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.

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.

My father died in 1957, just before I was born. My mother went to her Jewish aunt, who slammed the door in her face.

I just love music, and I love what music does for people.

I don't do any art to please any people.

Caring is beyond race. Either people care about you, or they don't.

I hate to sound blase about it, but literary status is not important to me. Being happy is important to me.

Be a member of the human race. Love somebody. Change the world.

If I grew up in a truly color-blind society, I would not be a black American.

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.

When I was coming up, a lot of serious jazz players couldn't stand funk.

When I was younger, I was ambitious. Now I'm not ambitious anymore. I just want to be happy. Does that make sense?

The media's image of us is as animals, and we were never that to me. I knew love from black folks.

Some writers like to go around talking about what they do all the time. I don't.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of mixed-race stories are these navel-gazing, horrible accounts of mulatto tragedy.

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 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 wasn't a guy built to write about entertainment.

A typewriter forces you to keep going, to march forward.

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?

I like stories where normal people are in abnormal situations, and that's what appeals to me about history.

I'm not one of those deeper, ethereal writers. I'm just trying to get it done.

Anyone can write your own life story.

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.

Every time I see something about the Wild West, I'm reminded that our version of history may not be what really happened.

I used to walk through the Old Times Square fearing for my life. Now I wouldn't be caught dead there.

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.

I cannot recall any moment of clarity about becoming a writer. I always liked to read. That's what did it.

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

You make your own luck by working hard, you know?

The whole notion of owning a person is so ludicrous, there's plenty of room to make fun.

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.

A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don't see themselves.

When you glorify violence, then it comes back to bite you.

God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.

Family is the last and greatest discovery. It is our last miracle.

My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.

You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself.

I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn't count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.

I asked her if I was black or white. She replied "You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!