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.
— James McBride
My father died in 1957, just before I was born. My mother went to her Jewish aunt, who slammed the door in her face.
Caring is beyond race. Either people care about you, or they don't.
When you study history in American schools, very rarely is the name John Brown mentioned. We know who Kanye West is or Twyla Tharp or Shania Twain.
When I was coming up, a lot of serious jazz players couldn't stand funk.
My mother tried her best to give us a sense of self-esteem.
I'm hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?
Anyone can write your own life story.
Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn't really help me understand a person.
A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don't see themselves.
When I was younger, I was ambitious. Now I'm not ambitious anymore. I just want to be happy. Does that make sense?
I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.
I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.
I used to walk through the Old Times Square fearing for my life. Now I wouldn't be caught dead there.
Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.
I hate to sound blase about it, but literary status is not important to me. Being happy is important to me.
James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.
I understand it's great to read a great book, but it's better to live your life. It just helps me. It's uncomfortable at times, but you have to live outside the circle.
When my mother left home, her family sat shivah for her, more because my father was not Jewish than because he was black.
I was in a special class in high school for truants. They made us stay together all day. Once a week, they would send us to a guidance counselor. He would sit me in his office and he would try to talk to me.
I think what makes his story unique from others is there is not really one piece of American pop music you hear today that does not have some James Brown in it.
There is a lot wrong with the church.
I don't do any art to please any people.
I'm not one of those deeper, ethereal writers. I'm just trying to get it done.
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.
The James Brown story is not about James Brown. It's about who's getting paid, whose interest is involved, who can squeeze the estate and black history for more.
Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.
I just love music, and I love what music does for people.
The whole notion of owning a person is so ludicrous, there's plenty of room to make fun.
Every time I see something about the Wild West, I'm reminded that our version of history may not be what really happened.
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.
I don't like living around too many fancy-pantsy folks. That ain't my thing. I'm not into phony people.
You make your own luck by working hard, you know?
John Brown was the abolitionist to end all abolitionists. People thought he was crazy. He was like John Coltrane playing free jazz, exhausting all possibilities in his approach to harmony and improvisation.
We would not have been a successful family without my father and stepfather, who were working-class men with better dreams for their children. We just wore them out.
If I grew up in a truly color-blind society, I would not be a black American.
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.
When you glorify violence, then it comes back to bite you.
The media's image of us is as animals, and we were never that to me. I knew love from black folks.
A typewriter forces you to keep going, to march forward.
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.
It would be nice if we redefined what we meant by 'war story.' If you're making $15,000 a year living in a certain area of Portland, trying to make it with three kids and no husband, that's a kind of war.
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?
I wasn't a guy built to write about entertainment.
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.
Be a member of the human race. Love somebody. Change the world.
A daily dose of Nietzsche goes a long way.
Some writers like to go around talking about what they do all the time. I don't.
Being a best-selling author doesn't make you a millionaire. It's not like Stephen King.
