James McBride

You can play Mozart all you want and pretend that it gives you class, but what is class, you know? Class is a bus driver on the M103 who gets off the bus to help somebody on board even though he's tired, he's exhausted, and he's two months behind on his mortgage. That's real class.

When you tell them you're a writer, they say, 'What have you written?' And then you've got to tell them what you've done. I don't ask a plumber what he does. Then I have to explain what I've done, and I haven't really, you know. I've just told some stories.

When it comes to the health of our families, Barack refused to listen to all those folks who told him to leave health reform for another day, another president. He didn't care whether it was the easy thing to do politically - that's not how he was raised - he cared that it was the right thing to do.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.