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.
I’m not interested in food. It’s just fuel.
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.
If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.
First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was so sorry, deep in my heart I was sorry, but all your “sorrys” are gone when a person dies. She was gone. Gone. That’s why you have to say all your “sorrys” and “I love yous” while a person is living, because tomorrow isn’t promised.
This is what happens when a boy becomes a man. You get stupider.
You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself,” my sister Jack told me several times. “Put yourself in God’s hands and you can’t go wrong.
I asked her who he was and she said, “He was a man ahead of his time.” She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys – any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about “the white devil” Mommy simply felt those references didn’t apply to her.
He said he loved Blue. He said he loved the evil in Blue. He loves the evil in all people. Because in loving their evil, he loves the evil in himself enough to surrender it to God, who washes it clean. He’s loving what God made, is what he said.
Most cars drove through there because the drivers is either from The Bottom and wanna get home – or they ain’t from The Bottom and wanna get home in one piece.
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.
The Old Man’s prayers was more sight than sound, really, more sense than sensibility. You had to be there: the aroma of burnt pheasant rolling through the air, the wide, Kansas prairie about, the smell of buffalo dung, the mosquitoes and wind eating at you one way, and him chawing at the wind the other. He was a plain terror in the praying department.
It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment.
If you think looking at three hundred boiling-mad, half-cocked Virginians holding every kind of breechloader under God’s sun staring back at you with murder in their eyes is a ticket to redemption, you is on the dot.
They were all trying hard to be American, you know, not knowing what to keep and what to leave behind. But you know what happens when you do that. If you throw water on the floor it will always find a hole, believe me.