Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James McBride
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: September 4
Jazz Musician
Journalist
Novelist
Saxophonist
Screenwriter
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Always
Nothing
Standing
Things
Important
Walk
Even
Land
Spot
Going
Happen
Speaks
Mind
Brain
Moves
Something
Moving
Significant
Years
Speak
Later
Good
Earth
Places

More quotes by James McBride

Image
The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.
James McBride
Image
First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.
James McBride
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself.
James McBride
Image
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
Image
So sweet and precious is family life.
James McBride
Image
Family is the last and greatest discovery. It is our last miracle.
James McBride
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
James McBride
Image
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
James McBride
Image
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
Image
As a journalist, the details always tell the story.
James McBride
Image
The black church will accept anybody.
James McBride
Image
If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.
James McBride
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
...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