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.

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

I felt like a Tinker toy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.

Sometimes it seemed like the truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.

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.

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.

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

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.

But what difference does it make? ... When you're mixed, you see how absurd this business of race is.

My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, "Come as you are."

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

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