One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
JAMES A. BALDWINThe world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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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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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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There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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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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The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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When the South has trouble with its Negroes – when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” – it blames “outside agitators” and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
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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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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN