James Baldwin Quotes

246 Sourced Quotes

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty...the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent humanity, the mark of cruelty.

James Baldwin
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

James Baldwin
It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.

James Baldwin
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

James Baldwin
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

James Baldwin
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

James Baldwin
If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

James Baldwin
A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

James Baldwin
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.

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

James Baldwin
You don't need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!

James Baldwin
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 Baldwin
I do not wish to see Negroes become the equal of their murderers. I wish us to become equal to ourselves. To become a people so free in themselves that they will have no need to—fear— others—and have no need to murder others.

James Baldwin
Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him-he may be forced to-but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.

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
It seems to be typical of life in America... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

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

James Baldwin
You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

James Baldwin
The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white—and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less.

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

James Baldwin
Such figures as Boy George do not disturb me nearly so much as do those relentlessly hetero (sexual?) keepers of the keys and seals, those who know what the world needs in the way of order and who are ready and willing to supply that order.

James Baldwin
Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.

James Baldwin
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.

James Baldwin
When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

James Baldwin
An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.

James Baldwin
A man's balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.

James Baldwin
Insofar as the American public creates a monster, they are not about to recognize it.

James Baldwin
Painters have often taught writers how to see.

James Baldwin
To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

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

James Baldwin