You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou write in order to change the world.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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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.
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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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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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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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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN