Explore Quotes by James Mcbride

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

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.

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

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

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

A daily dose of Nietzsche goes a long way.

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

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 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.

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

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 can't live for literature. You can't live for the job.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.