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.
James McBrideI 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.
James McBrideI 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.
James McBrideMy 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.
James McBride