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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.

James McBride

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James McBride
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: September 4
Jazz Musician
Journalist
Novelist
Saxophonist
Screenwriter
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Never
Legged
Like
Seemed
World
Side
Sides
Truth
Soul
Find
Bandy
Sometimes
Dashed

More quotes by James McBride

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The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.
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It is hard to find romance in the present because there's nothing left to the imagination.
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It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets.
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First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.
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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.
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I wish all critics, no matter their color, were more sophisticated when it comes to the moral questions a film like 'St. Anna' is trying to raise.
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Family is the last and greatest discovery. It is our last miracle.
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It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.
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Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.
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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.
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You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself.
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...since I was a little boy, she had always wanted me to go. She was always sending me off on a bus someplace, to elementary school, to camp, to relatives in Kentucky, to college. She pushed me away from her just as she'd pushed my elder siblings away when we lived in New York, literally shoving them out the front door when they left for college.
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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.
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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
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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
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I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn't count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.
James McBride
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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
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Some things in this world just ain't meant to be, not in the times we want 'em to, and the heart has to hold it in this world as a remembrance, a promise for the world that's to come. There's a prize at the end of all of it, but still, that's a heavy load to bear.
James McBride
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If you're a creative person, you'd better not read what people write about you, because if it's good it'll blow your head up and it'll force you not to take the subway and you'll start taking cabs, and you'd better stay around people, and if it's bad, it just hurts your feelings so much it discourages you.
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The black church will accept anybody.
James McBride