The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
JAMES A. BALDWINArtists are here to disturb the peace.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
-
-
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 -
The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
If the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Hatred destroys the person who hates.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
JAMES A. BALDWIN