Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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 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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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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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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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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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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You write in order to change the world.
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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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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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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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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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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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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES A. BALDWIN