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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.

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
Books
Living
Book
Rode
Something
Involving
Like
Earn
Jazz
Horse
Stay

More quotes by James McBride

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You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself.
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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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.
James McBride
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Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.
James McBride
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God gived you the seed. But the watering and caring of that seed is up to you.
James McBride
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Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
James McBride
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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.
James McBride
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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
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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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It is hard to find romance in the present because there's nothing left to the imagination.
James McBride
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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
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As a journalist, the details always tell the story.
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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I'm proud of 'Miracle at St. Anna' and I loved it there's no question in my mind it's as good as any movie that came out in 2007.
James McBride
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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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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
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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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The black church will accept anybody.
James McBride
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If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.
James McBride
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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.
James McBride