247 Quotes by James McBride

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

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.

The whole notion of owning a person is so ludicrous, there's plenty of room to make fun.

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.

The abolitionists were not like the rugged people out West, and they were not like John Brown, either. They were people who made speeches and did politics.

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

I write stories that are already in the air, and I think it's important to have the correct listening device to tune in to that frequency.

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.

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.