James Baldwin Quotes

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

"There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive."

You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I'm still learning how to write. I don't know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac. (1984)

The American war in Vietnam raises several questions. One is whether or not small nations, in this age of super-states and and live as they feel they should. For only the people of a superpowers, will be allowed to work out their own destinies country have the right, or the spiritual power, to determine that country's way of life.

There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don't believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it — and almost all of us have one way or another — this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.

Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that moment would have locked me forever in that room with him. And in a way this was exactly what I wanted.

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

"...but you were never really white in the first place. Nobody is. Nobody has, even, ever wanted to be white, unless they are afraid of being black. But being black is nothing to be afraid of. I knew that before I met you, and I have learned it again, through you. Perhaps being white is not a conceivable condition, but a terrifying fantasy, a moral choice.”

Whose little boy are you?

One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.

At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.