American novelist (1960- )
Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
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--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
I listen to what white people say and, still more, to what they don't say. I must: my life may depend on what I hear: I cannot afford to be surprised.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Contrary to its legend, Paris does not offer many distractions; or, those distractions that it offers are like French pastry, vivid and insubstantial, sweet on the tongue and sour in the belly.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
And I tell you something else, don’t none of you forget it: I know a lot of people done took their own lives and they’re walking up and down the streets today and some of them is preaching the gospel and some is sitting in the seats of the mighty. Now, you remember that. If the world wasn’t so full of dead folks maybe those of us that’s trying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so bad.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
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 most inhuman excesses.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Price of the Ticket
One cannot dwell on these things, these echoes of what might, in some other age, and in some other body, have been; one must attempt to deal with what is, or else go under, or go mad. And yet--to deal with what is! Who can do it?
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
We had known each other for many years; starved together, worked together, loved each other, suffered each other, made love; and yet the most tremendous consummation of our love was occurring now, as she patiently, in love and terror, held my hand.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself!
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
A force of circumstance is not poverty merely but color.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn't make a right, either.
JAMES BALDWIN
New York Times, April 9, 1967