Explore Quotes by James Mcbride

I wasn't a guy built to write about entertainment.

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.

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

Being a best-selling author doesn't make you a millionaire. It's not like Stephen King.

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.

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

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.

I cannot recall any moment of clarity about becoming a writer. I always liked to read. That's what did it.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

I can't be a creative person if I'm a celebrity.

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.

People process pain differently. My family, we were pretty humorous about things that went on.

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.

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.

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