James McBride Quotes

I look for something that is highly unusual, involving ordinary people caught in extraordinary situations.

Being connected with individual lives reminds us in the most basic way of the human face of history. Too often we forget how significant the lives of ordinary people are.

I'm really interested in real people in extraordinary situations. The detail and reality to that.

The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.

Historyis nothing other than a collection of the lives of people, some of them great, some of them ordinarynothing other than a collection of what people have done in challenging circumstances and how they have risen to those circumstances.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

If you read any of my books, they tend to have a strong historical perspective.

I like writing historical fiction.

I'm drawn to stories about ordinary people who get tangled up in an extraordinary event or idea or emotion. I'm not saying I don't love films about super-people or super-doctors, but my preference is for stories about how we get through this life, what it is to be human, because I'm always struggling with it myself.

My point of view when I make a book or I make a movie is to see the humanistic point of view. The point of view of the daily life of normal people.

Although this is a fictitious story the history is real. You don't want to re-write history but you certainly want to portray events and characters as realistically as you can.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

I love history because when you strip away the social and political aspects, it's really just a bunch of fun stories.

My process for determining which eras I'd write about was to just read history books that gave a really broad overview of Chinese history. And when I came across a historical figure or a historical incident that was especially interesting to me, ideas for characters and stories would surface.

When I'm watching television or a movie, I like to see stories that are extraordinary. I don't need it be something that is, 'Well this makes more sense to me because I can see this happening to me, or this happened to me.'

It's true that I'm drawn to unusual stories. Normal roles don't really attract me.

There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.

I prefer to write about ordinary people who find themselves in a singularly bizarre situation - that is to say, the one moment in their lives when they are forced to confront danger or mystery.

Novels taught me that history is dramatic. I wanted my students to know that, too.

I've never really seen archaeology as being any different from history. What I love are the stories of human beings that were around 1,000 years ago and how they lived - archaeology is another aspect to that.

My books are about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations.

Writing about conflict has provided these dramatic opportunities to talk about really substantial moments in a person's life. I'm not writing about superheroes; I'm writing about ordinary people.

Every reality show plot pales in comparison to our history.

History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought.