James A. Baldwin Quotes

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

The impossible is the least that one can demand.

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

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

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

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

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.

For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.

For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.

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

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

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

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

Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

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

You took the best, so why not take the rest?

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.

You write in order to change the world.

One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.