One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
JAMES A. BALDWINThe 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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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.
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There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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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.
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There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one–you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.
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You write in order to change the world.
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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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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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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES A. BALDWIN