Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
JAMES A. BALDWINDrive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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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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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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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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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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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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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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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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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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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWIN






