James Baldwin Quotes
200 James Baldwin Quotes
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When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn’t a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
James Baldwin
Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
James Baldwin
Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced… Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
James Baldwin
The questions which ones asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.
James Baldwin
You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
James Baldwin
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
James Baldwin
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the utmost inhuman excesses.
James Baldwin
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
James Baldwin
The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
James Baldwin
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
James Baldwin
If the word integration means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
James Baldwin
The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
James Baldwin
Nothing is more desirable than to released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
James Baldwin
The future is not what it was. The future is … black.
James Baldwin
The crisis is neither regional nor racial. It is a matter of the national life or death
James Baldwin
No truce can be binding until the American people and our representatives are able to accept the simple fact that the Negro is a man.
James Baldwin
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
James Baldwin
I was born in Harlem. I was raised in Harlem and, indeed, as long as I live I’ll never be able to leave Harlem.
James Baldwin
The one thing my father did do for me, was that he taught me how to fight. I have to know how to fight because I fought him so hard.
James Baldwin
I began plotting novels about the time I learned to read.
James Baldwin
[After bad experiences with welfare workers and debt collers on Orilla Miller his school drama instructor who was] My first key, my first clue that white people were human.
James Baldwin
I can conceive of no Negro native to this country, who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.
James Baldwin
I always wrote the school plays and all that jazz.
James Baldwin
Writing was my great consolation. I could be as grotesque as a dwarf, and that wouldn’t matter.
James Baldwin
[In 1937 at his final year of high school on his desire to become a playwright] To be numbered among the great artists of my race.
James Baldwin
Afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.
James Baldwin
Make America what America must become.
James Baldwin
Both clung to a fantasy rather than to each other, tried to suck pleasure from the crannies of the mind, rather than surrender the secrets of the body.
James Baldwin
It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length with nothing to be articulate about.
James Baldwin
No true account really of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. As it is, the only way that you can deal with it is by doing great violence to the assumptions on which the vocabulary is based.
James Baldwin
[On writing a book with a homosexual theme] They said I would – I was a Negro writer and I would reach a very special audience. And I would be dead if I alienated that audience. That, in effect, nobody would accept that book – coming from me. My agent told me to burn it.
James Baldwin
If you’re a Negro, you’re in the center of that peculiar affliction because anybody can touch you – when the sun goes down. You know, you’re the target for everybody’s fantasies.
James Baldwin
The sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined, you know. If Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality.
James Baldwin
By the time I was twenty-four, I had decided to stop reviewing books about the Negro problem – which, by this time, was only slightly less horrible in print than it was in life.
James Baldwin
I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.
James Baldwin
If I was trying to discover myself, on the whole, when examined, a somewhat dubious notion, since I was also trying to avoid myself – there was, certainly, between that self and me, the accumulated rock of ages. This rock scarred the hand, and all tools broke against it… The hope of salvation – identity – depended on whether or not one would be able to decipher and describe the rock.
James Baldwin
I was trying to locate myself within a specific inheritance and to use that inheritance, precisely, to claim the birthright from which that inheritance had so brutally and specifically excluded me.
James Baldwin
I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth.
James Baldwin
The history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met.
James Baldwin
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
James Baldwin
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