Latest James McBride Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I'm a better musician now, and I rarely practice because age has taught me the value of economy. And I think I'm a better writer now because I don't waste as much time, dilly-dallying and sassafrassin' and sloop and sloppin' and frying eggs. When you start writing, half the time you're just saying howdy to the page. My process now is a little more lean and muscular. I don't waste a lot of time. When I had kids, I learned how much time I had before, and how much time you actually need to do something. If you don't have time, you'll just do it and get it done.

  James McBride

  Writing, Kids, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Music and writing do fold together in the sense that you have to have a certain level of skill in order to execute your ideas and you need a medium. The idea of improvisation is one that many writers fall into, and I improvise a great deal when I'm writing, but there's a structural framework that I'm working around, and that takes more time than the actual writing. Once the characters get to yapping and talking, they'll move from one room to the next, and I just have to make sure that the house is built. That's really hard, that's the kind of thing that sits with you all day long.

  James McBride

  Moving, Fall, Character

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There has to be some mystery in life, because the joy of being a writer and the joy of being a musician is the joy of discovery. I don't want someone discovering for me what I should be discovering on my own. If a person is discovering for me, then they're living for me. It's my responsibility, indeed it's my privilege, to go out and discover the world for myself.

  James McBride

  Responsibility, Joy, Musician

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It's a real stumper to sit around and try to think in your own head, but when you go into somebody else's head that takes the foot off the breaks. You can think in someone else's head.

  James McBride

  Real, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The basic thing is to be humble, and pretend you're a bartender in the tavern of life. Don't get too comfortable and don't really listen to anybody else. Don't stand around with a bunch of writers and talk about writing. You know when you see plumbers at a plumbers convention, usually they're not talking about plumbing: they're talking about whatever it is that two men happen to talk about. They're talking about sports, their wives and children. I just tell my students, don't talk about writing too much, just go out and do it. Find out whatever you need to get to the mainland.

  James McBride

  Sports, Children, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I can write anywhere really. I have a hard time writing when the birds are tweeting and the brooks are running outside. I've tried that several times, for months at a time, trying to write in a quiet, wonderful place where birds are twittering and coffee's brewing. And nothing happens. But if I'm in an old dump like my old apartment and I can't find my fingernail clippers and nothing's working except the old tea maker, that's just great. You always have to find and live in a place that's a little uncomfortable when you're a writer. You need a burr in your side.

  James McBride

  Running, Writing, Hard Times

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It is hard to find romance in the present because there's nothing left to the imagination.

  James McBride

  Imagination, Romance

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There are some really great books that have been written about slavery, but I don't think that the discourse about it in society has been very accurate or healthy. I don't think we've come up with ways to tell it that don't insult people or hit them in the wrong way. Part of the problem is that most people don't really understand what slavery was anyway. Most white people didn't own slaves. Slavery was a way of life, just like driving cars is a way of life now. It doesn't mean that it was right.

  James McBride

  Book, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When you walk the significant land, the land speaks to you - even if it's 150 years later. You walk the earth and good things happen. There's always something to be said for going to a spot, even if there's nothing there. That's why you have a brain, your mind moves to other places when you're standing at an important spot.

  James McBride

  Moving, Brain, Mind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The act of choosing what to place in your piece when you're a historian or a non-fiction writer already renders it into fiction for someone else. In some ways fiction comes a lot closer to reality. When you start talking about something as brutal as slavery and life in the American West, it's really important to take a non- judgmental stance. We romanticize a great deal about life in the American West, but I thank God I wasn't living during that time. No matter what color you were, it was rough, crude, tough living.

  James McBride

  Reality, Important, Thank God

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think comedy allows people to accept the more difficult parts of history. And history, if it's presented wrong, is just very depressing, particularly the history of slavery. If slavery is presented properly, it's a great story. But I think that within the commercial world of storytelling in which I live, there haven't been many strong works that discuss slavery in ways that are palatable and funny and interesting to the reader.

  James McBride

  Depressing, Strong, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There are two responses to really awful things. One is to lament and say, "Oh my God, oh lord." And the other is to laugh at it a little bit, try your best to deal with it and, if you can, forget about it as soon as possible.

  James McBride

  Laughing, Trying, Forget

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• What humor allows you to do is to let the past go with less pain. It's a healing element. It releases some of the pain from the shotgun wound.

  James McBride

  Pain, Healing, Past

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I just read history books. I read nothing but history books. They have so much to give; I wish I'd majored in history in college.

  James McBride

  Book, College, Giving

  Source: www.pbs.org

• My whole family was - we grew up in New York, but all my relatives and all my father and stepfather's family, they were all from the South. So I like that old Black voice, and I love the sort of old Black man with a corncob pipe, sitting there telling a whopper.

  James McBride

  New York, Father, Men

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think a lot of the history we've read up to this point, some of it is just off. It's written with the same prejudice that certain networks have when they report the news of the day.

  James McBride

  Thinking, Prejudice, News

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Slavery was a web of relationships, and if people knew how thick the whole business was, they would not make fun of people like Harriet Tubman. They would understand how intelligent she was and how sharp.

  James McBride

  Fun, Intelligent, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The thing that I do is that when I fail, I just keep quiet about it. I just let it go. It's done. I just go to the next thing. I don't complain, I don't go to - I pick my battles very, very judiciously, and I just assume that there's good in the heart of everybody.

  James McBride

  Heart, Let It Go, Battle

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I'm one of the few Black writers, or African American writers, who managed to work my way through the system so that it has allowed me to speak in a kind of free way. But most African American writers don't have that. They don't have that opportunity, they don't have that.

  James McBride

  Opportunity, African American, Black

  Source: www.pbs.org

• As a journalist, I never critiqued anyone. I never review books. I've never felt qualified as a musician to say whether someone is a good musician or a bad musician. What happens with Black writers and Black artists is that if you're critiqued, for example, by a Black historian who wants to get his name on the cover of "The New York Times," and he says something, like, wacky, well, he'll get his name on the cover of "The New York Times" and he might get tenure, and your career suffers.

  James McBride

  New York, Book, Artist

  Source: www.pbs.org

• You're not a Black man. You're a human being in God's eyes. So when you sit down to talk to someone and you talk to them in really intelligent terms, you ask difficult questions, there's a militancy that's assigned to you without you asking for it, because you are simply judged by what you look like. If you're a white person asking the same questions, you'd be one of these CNN guys and say how brilliant he is. That doesn't work for you, because this is the world we live in.

  James McBride

  Eye, Intelligent, Men

  Source: www.pbs.org

• If you're going to cheat and take people's history and you're not writing the Bible, you ain't really so great. But if you try to do it in a way that doesn't hurt too many people, then you probably can get out of bed in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror.

  James McBride

  Hurt, Morning, Writing

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I'm trying to educate people about things that I believe are right, and some of the things that I believe are right might not be right, so I live in constant self-doubt. I think that creates a kind of search that you have to have, and it prevents you from doing a lot of stuff that you would normally do.

  James McBride

  Believe, Thinking, Self

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I could have been, and may one day well be a high school English teacher, because I've been given so much I just feel like I have to give something back. The fact that some people consider my work to be good or strong, it's nice, but I know in my heart that if it's not coming - oftentimes it's probably not coming from the best place.

  James McBride

  Teacher, Strong, Nice

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I grew up in the church, and so I feel that God gave me certain things to do, and I'm lucky enough to kind of have figured those things out. I just don't want to die not having tried to help somebody else with what I know.

  James McBride

  Church, Lucky, Want

  Source: www.pbs.org