You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
JAMES A. BALDWINA man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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A devotion to humanity is… too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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You write in order to change the world.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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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.
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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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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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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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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
JAMES A. BALDWIN