The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
JAMES A. BALDWINIt 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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.
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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.
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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
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You write in order to change the world.
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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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.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES A. BALDWIN