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James McBride [1957-0] American

Rank: 102
Writer

James McBride is an American writer and musician. He is the recipient of the 2013 National Book Award for fiction for his novel The Good Lord Bird.

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Quote	Tags	Rank
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.	Home	101
Be kind to the living.		102
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.	Space	103
Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.		104
Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.		105
You make your own luck by working hard, you know?		106
Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn't really help me understand a person.		107
As a journalist, the details always tell the story.		108
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.		109
Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.		110
If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.		111
First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.		112
I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.		113
I'm not interested in food. It's just fuel.		114
My family is my career.		115
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.		116
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.		117
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.		118
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.		119
The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.		120
The black church will accept anybody.		121
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.		122
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.		123
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.		124
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.	Humor	125
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.		126
People process pain differently. My family, we were pretty humorous about things that went on.		201
I read more history books than anything else.		202
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.		203
You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.		204
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.		205
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.		206
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.		207
I can't be a creative person if I'm a celebrity.		208
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.		209
I love the language of, you know, the old black country man with a blues guitar and... boots and the quick banter.		210
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.		211
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.		212
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.		213
James Brown's music still sounds as fresh and as good and as new as it did when he first created it.		214
A band is not a democracy: It's show business.		215
Writing teaches writing.		216
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.		217
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.		218
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.		219
I split my time between a small town in New Jersey and New York City.		220
Most of my work is done when everyone else is asleep.		221
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.		222
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.		223
I don't want to read a book that's depressing.		224
Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.		225
You can't live for literature. You can't live for the job.		226
I don't live for my work. My life is my life. That's more important, and I think that helps my work.		301
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.		302
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.		303
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.		304
Spike Lee listens a lot. He's one of the quietest creative people I've ever met.		305
Everybody knew James Brown. Every musician dreamed of being in his band.		306
I cannot recall any moment of clarity about becoming a writer. I always liked to read. That's what did it.		307
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.		308
We're learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.		309
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.		310
My wife and kids like the quiet and the countryside - I still find that kind of quiet hard to listen to.		311
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.		312
I like stories where normal people are in abnormal situations, and that's what appeals to me about history.		313
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.		314
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.		315
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.		316
James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.		317
Being a best-selling author doesn't make you a millionaire. It's not like Stephen King.		318
I hate to sound blase about it, but literary status is not important to me. Being happy is important to me.		319
Some writers like to go around talking about what they do all the time. I don't.		320
I don't like living around too many fancy-pantsy folks. That ain't my thing. I'm not into phony people.		321
Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.		322
A daily dose of Nietzsche goes a long way.		323
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.		324
I used to walk through the Old Times Square fearing for my life. Now I wouldn't be caught dead there.		325
Be a member of the human race. Love somebody. Change the world.		326
Every time I see something about the Wild West, I'm reminded that our version of history may not be what really happened.		401
I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.		402
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.		403
The whole notion of owning a person is so ludicrous, there's plenty of room to make fun.		404
I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.		405
I wasn't a guy built to write about entertainment.		406
I just love music, and I love what music does for people.		407
When I was younger, I was ambitious. Now I'm not ambitious anymore. I just want to be happy. Does that make sense?		408
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?		409
A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don't see themselves.		410
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.		411
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.		412
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.		413
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.		414
Anyone can write your own life story.		415
A typewriter forces you to keep going, to march forward.		416
I'm not one of those deeper, ethereal writers. I'm just trying to get it done.		417
I'm hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?		418
The media's image of us is as animals, and we were never that to me. I knew love from black folks.		419
I don't do any art to please any people.		420
My mother tried her best to give us a sense of self-esteem.		421
When you glorify violence, then it comes back to bite you.		422
There is a lot wrong with the church.		423
When I was coming up, a lot of serious jazz players couldn't stand funk.		424
A lot of mixed-race stories are these navel-gazing, horrible accounts of mulatto tragedy.		425
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.		426
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.		501
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.		502
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.		503
Caring is beyond race. Either people care about you, or they don't.		504
If I grew up in a truly color-blind society, I would not be a black American.		505
When my mother left home, her family sat shivah for her, more because my father was not Jewish than because he was black.		506
My father died in 1957, just before I was born. My mother went to her Jewish aunt, who slammed the door in her face.		507
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.		508
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.		509
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.		510

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