Top 77 James McBride Quotes

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.

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

Most of my work is done when everyone else is asleep.

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

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?

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.

My wife and kids like the quiet and the countryside – I still find that kind of quiet hard to listen to.

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.

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.

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

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.

Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he’s a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he’s a novel.

Spike Lee listens a lot. He’s one of the quietest creative people I’ve ever met.

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.

The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don’t want to touch.

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.

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

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.

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

I split my time between a small town in New Jersey and New York City.

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.

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.

There is a lot wrong with the church.

I’m not interested in food. It’s just fuel.

Anyone can write your own life story.

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.

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

I don’t live for my work. My life is my life. That’s more important, and I think that helps my work.

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

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.

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 Brown’s music still sounds as fresh and as good and as new as it did when he first created it.

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.

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

Writing teaches writing.

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

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.

Until you expose the cancer, you can’t fix it.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.

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

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.

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.

A band is not a democracy: It’s show business.

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

A daily dose of Nietzsche goes a long way.

James Brown’s life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.

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

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

Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.

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.

Be kind to the living.

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.

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.