James McBride quotes:

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.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

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.

I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.

Whatever you is, Onion," he said, "be it full.

People don't realize you're blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it's got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I'm home.

My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.

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.

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.

God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.

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.

My whole family was - we grew up in New York, but all my relatives and all my father and stepfather's family, they were all from the South. So I like that old Black voice, and I love the sort of old Black man with a corncob pipe, sitting there telling a whopper.

The black church will accept anybody.

The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.

I asked her if I was black or white. She replied "You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

I could have been, and may one day well be a high school English teacher, because I've been given so much I just feel like I have to give something back. The fact that some people consider my work to be good or strong, it's nice, but I know in my heart that if it's not coming - oftentimes it's probably not coming from the best place.

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.

When you're interviewing someone, even your mother - you have to sort of deal with you have to get some objective space from yourself and the person but you also have to find what's the best way to get the information from that person.

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.

If you're going to cheat and take people's history and you're not writing the Bible, you ain't really so great. But if you try to do it in a way that doesn't hurt too many people, then you probably can get out of bed in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror.

See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all. The rest you can deal with. It's not about black or white. It's about God and don't let anyone tell you different. All this Jungle fever! Shoot! The Jungle fever goes away, honey, and then what are you gonna do?

Chase looked 'round and seen Frederick's grave where we'd buried him."Who's that?""Don't know. We been hiding in this thicket while the Free Staters was scouting 'round here. I heard 'em say it was one of theirs."Chase pondered the grave thoughtfully"It's a fresh grave. We ought to see if who'sever in there got on boots," he said.

You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself,

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.

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.

But what difference does it make? ... When you're mixed, you see how absurd this business of race is.

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

As a journalist, I never critiqued anyone. I never review books. I've never felt qualified as a musician to say whether someone is a good musician or a bad musician. What happens with Black writers and Black artists is that if you're critiqued, for example, by a Black historian who wants to get his name on the cover of "The New York Times," and he says something, like, wacky, well, he'll get his name on the cover of "The New York Times" and he might get tenure, and your career suffers.

Be kind to the living.

You're not a Black man. You're a human being in God's eyes. So when you sit down to talk to someone and you talk to them in really intelligent terms, you ask difficult questions, there's a militancy that's assigned to you without you asking for it, because you are simply judged by what you look like. If you're a white person asking the same questions, you'd be one of these CNN guys and say how brilliant he is. That doesn't work for you, because this is the world we live in.

My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, "Come as you are."

Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

I felt like a Tinker toy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.

...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.

There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's.

So sweet and precious is family life.

Family is the last and greatest discovery. It is our last miracle.

The Good Lord Bird don't run in a flock. He Flies alone. You know why? He's searching. Looking for the right tree. And when he sees that tree, that dead tree that's taking all the nutrition and good things from the forest floor. He goes out and he gnaws at it, and he gnaws at it till the thing gets tired and it falls down. And the dirt from it raises other trees. It gives them good things to eat. It makes 'em strong. Gives 'em life. And the circle goes 'round.

God gived you the seed. But the watering and caring of that seed is up to you.

I'm trying to educate people about things that I believe are right, and some of the things that I believe are right might not be right, so I live in constant self-doubt. I think that creates a kind of search that you have to have, and it prevents you from doing a lot of stuff that you would normally do.

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.

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.

The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus.

Put yourself in God's hands and you can't go wrong.

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.

I grew up in the church, and so I feel that God gave me certain things to do, and I'm lucky enough to kind of have figured those things out. I just don't want to die not having tried to help somebody else with what I know.

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.

You know what needs to be done when you're a writer. You know what the job is, particularly if you're an African American writer, or if you deal with people, or if your subjects are poor people or people who need voice. So you don't really need to know whether or not you are doing the right thing. What you have to be wary of if you're doing the right thing to the right level that will surpass your own life. I'm hoping that my work will surpass my own life.

Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.

I'm not interested in food. It's just fuel.

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.

My family is my career.

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.

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.

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.