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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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James McBride
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: September 4
Jazz Musician
Journalist
Novelist
Saxophonist
Screenwriter
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Like
Intelligent
People
Fun
Knew
Understand
Harriet
Business
Sharp
Whole
Thick
Make
Slavery
Would
Relationships

More quotes by 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.
James McBride
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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.
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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But at the end of the day, there are some questions that have no answers, and then one answer that has no question: love rules the game. Every time. All the time. That’s what counts.
James McBride
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The black church will accept anybody.
James McBride
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As a journalist, the details always tell the story.
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
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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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So sweet and precious is family life.
James McBride
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Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.
James McBride
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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.
James McBride
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The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.
James McBride
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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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Testosterone is a sex hormone, and I think it is the most social of hormones. The major social effect of testosterone is to orient us toward issues of sex and power. By the end of puberty testosterone levels in males are 8 to 10 times higher than in females, but decrease with age.
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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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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...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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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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You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself.
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