Quotes from James McBride

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

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

I don't want to read a book that's depressing.

Writing teaches writing.

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.

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.

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

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

Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

Every time I see something about the Wild West, I'm reminded that our version of history may not be what really happened.

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.

I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.

So sweet and precious is family life.

I love the language of, you know, the old black country man with a blues guitar and... boots and the quick banter.

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

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

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.

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.