James A. Baldwin Quotes

I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on ... By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]

One writes out of one thing only-one's own experience,

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

There exists among the intolerable degraded, the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read . The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy , and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.

The purpose of education ... is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

You don't need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!

Employment is my right my destiny.

You cannot fix what you will not face.

The trick is to love somebody ... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.

Such figures as Boy George do not disturb me nearly so much as do those relentlessly hetero (sexual?) keepers of the keys and seals, those who know what the world needs in the way of order and who are ready and willing to supply that order.

Every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.

She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.

If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

When the South has trouble with its Negroes when the Negroes refuse to remain in their "place" it blames "outside agitators" and "Northern interference." When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.

When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.

Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.

A man's balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.

After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.

If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.

You go into a book and you're in the dark, really. You go in with a certain fear and trembling. You know one thing. You know you will not be the same person when this voyage is over. But you don't know what's going to happen to you between getting on the boat and stepping off.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

Most people ... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.

In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.

Words like 'freedom', 'justice' and 'democracy' are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous, and above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.

There was no room in God's army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God's will. Let the church cry amen to this!

All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.

Hatred destroys the person who hates.

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.

Man cannot live by profit alone.

There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed ... But the conquest of the physical world is not man's only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through vast forests, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.

I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.

I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?

The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.

The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.

A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.

America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one's own sleep.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.

It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin
to love and be loved.

Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty - necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.

Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.

It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

Great art can only be created out of love.

In the invincible and indescribable squalor of Harlem ... I was tormented. I felt caged, like an animal. I wanted to escape. I felt if I did not get out I would slowly strangle.

All racists are irresponsible.

If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only be setting someone free.

A devotion to humanity is ... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.

Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

Recognizing a problem doesn't always bring a solution, but until we recognize that problem, there can be no solution.

The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.

There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare
but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.

The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.