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
I just love music, and I love what music does for people.
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.
Caring is beyond race. Either people care about you, or they don't.
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.
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
I'm hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?
Anyone can write your own life story.
I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.
Every time I see something about the Wild West, I'm reminded that our version of history may not be what really happened.
James Brown's music still sounds as fresh and as good and as new as it did when he first created it.
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.
I used to walk through the Old Times Square fearing for my life. Now I wouldn't be caught dead there.
My father died in 1957, just before I was born. My mother went to her Jewish aunt, who slammed the door in her face.
First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.
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.
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.
If I grew up in a truly color-blind society, I would not be a black American.
I read more history books than anything else.
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.
When you glorify violence, then it comes back to bite you.
I don't want to read a book that's depressing.
My wife and kids like the quiet and the countryside - I still find that kind of quiet hard to listen to.
I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.
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.
I don't like living around too many fancy-pantsy folks. That ain't my thing. I'm not into phony people.
Be kind to the living.
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 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.
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.
I'm not interested in food. It's just fuel.
Be a member of the human race. Love somebody. Change the world.
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.
A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don't see themselves.
I love the language of, you know, the old black country man with a blues guitar and... boots and the quick banter.
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 Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.
Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.
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.
I cannot recall any moment of clarity about becoming a writer. I always liked to read. That's what did it.
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.
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.
You make your own luck by working hard, you know?
A band is not a democracy: It's show business.
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.
As a journalist, the details always tell the story.
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.
If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.
Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.
My family is my career.
