James Baldwin Quotes

246 Sourced Quotes

You never get the book you wanted, you settle for the book you get.

James Baldwin
True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers, and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life

James Baldwin
If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.

James Baldwin
Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever.

James Baldwin
My face is like a face you have seen many times.

James Baldwin
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

James Baldwin
The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

James Baldwin
One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

James Baldwin
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won't destroy you.

James Baldwin
The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

James Baldwin
Boy, ain't it time you was thinking about your soul?

James Baldwin
I'm going to have my baby and I'm going to bring him up to be a man.

James Baldwin
The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs— as who has not?— of human love, God's love alone is left.

James Baldwin
I knew Richard [Wright] and I loved him. [...] I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself.

James Baldwin
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear.

James Baldwin
The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.

James Baldwin
An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressure of life like clay in a season of drought.

James Baldwin
For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

James Baldwin
It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.

James Baldwin
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

James Baldwin
I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

James Baldwin
I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.

James Baldwin
Well,' I said, 'Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn't what you feel in New York — 'He was smiling. I stopped. 'What do you feel in New York?' he asked. 'Perhaps you feel,' I told him, 'all the time to come. There's such power there, everything is in such movement. You can't help wondering—I can't help wondering—what it will all be like— many years from now.

James Baldwin
European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.

James Baldwin
It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

James Baldwin