James McBride

“As a journalist, the details always tell the story.”

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

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

“We're learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.”

“Be a member of the human race. Love somebody. Change the world.”

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

“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.”

“John Brown was clearly flawed in real life. He did some terrible things, but he did some things none of us would have had the heart to do. His moral leanings were unquestionably admirable.”

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

“It's God's world. He washes you clean. He makes you whole. He puts rain in your garden and sunshine in your heart. "Clarence”

“When I was younger, I was ambitious. Now I'm not ambitious anymore. I just want to be happy. Does that make sense?”

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

“First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.”

“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.”

“Not a week after Annie put her foot in Mrs. Huffmaster's duff, the Captain upped and laid down the date.”

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

“A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don't see themselves.”

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

“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.”