The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
JAMES A. BALDWINLife is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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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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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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You write in order to change the world.
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life — without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN