Quotes from James McBride

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

I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.

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.

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

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.

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

Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.

I read more history books than anything else.

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

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 think only now am I at the age where I've forgiven the past enough to say, 'You know what? Slavery was there. Let's talk about it in ways that will help us face tomorrow.

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.

But at the end of the day, there are some questions that have no answers, and then one answer that has no question: love rules the game. Every time. All the time. That's what counts.

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.

A lot of mixed-race stories are these navel-gazing, horrible accounts of mulatto tragedy.

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

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

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

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

I'm hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?

The hard part about writing about a guy like John Brown is that he was so serious, and his cause was so serious, that most of what's been written about him is really serious and, in my opinion, a little bit boring.

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.