James McBride

The James Brown story is not about James Brown. It's about who's getting paid, whose interest is involved, who can squeeze the estate and black history for more.

My wife and kids like the quiet and the countryside - I still find that kind of quiet hard to listen to.

I grew up in a house with a lot of kids, brothers and sisters. So I don't mind a lot of talking, yelling, playing. I can tune most of that out.

When the great jazz and blues clubs closed - joints where the cash register rang loudly and there wasn't ESPN on TV over the bandstand, and people smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey and hollered 'Play on!' - When those places closed, I was pretty much done.

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.

I hate to sound blase about it, but literary status is not important to me. Being happy is important to me.

When I was younger, I was ambitious. Now I'm not ambitious anymore. I just want to be happy. Does that make sense?

The whole notion of owning a person is so ludicrous, there's plenty of room to make fun.

Being a best-selling author doesn't make you a millionaire. It's not like Stephen King.

Everybody knew James Brown. Every musician dreamed of being in his band.

The hard part about writing about a guy like John Brown is that he was so serious, and his cause was so serious, that most of what's been written about him is really serious and, in my opinion, a little bit boring.

Don't get me started on Americans and war. One of the things I learnt over in Italy is how they mythologised the war so that it's all good old gung-ho guys from Omaha and ignored everyone else's role.