American novelist (1960- )
Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Nation, July 7, 1956
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
You carry this pain around inside all day and all night long. No way to beat it--no way. But when I started getting high, I was cool, and it didn't bother me. And I wasn't lonely then, it was all right. And the chicks--I could handle them, they couldn't reach me. And I didn't know I was hooked--until I was hooked.
JAMES BALDWIN
Blues for Mister Charlie
We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them -- to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That's very important. If you don't forgive yourself you'll never be able to forgive anybody else and you'll go on committing the same crimes forever.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
They do not believe there can be tears between men. They think we are only playing a game and that we do it to shock them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
We had crossed from death into what certainly sounded like life. And not only did it sound like life, it looked like life; and not only did it look like life, it looked like a particular life, a life which was a particular reproach to me.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
Folks can change their ways much as they want to. But I don’t care how many times you change your ways, what’s in you is in you, and it’s got to come out.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
JAMES BALDWIN
interview with Julius Lester, New York Times, May 27, 1984
I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt.
JAMES BALDWIN
Autobiographical Notes
I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
He stopped. He had not liked the book. He could not take it seriously. It was an able, intelligent, mildly perceptive tour de force and it would never mean anything to anyone.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting. Or I thought, but I am happy. And he loves me. I am safe. Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him touch me again. Then, when he touched me, I thought it doesn’t matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the touch of hands, of Giovanni’s hands, or anybody’s hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
One of the most American of attributes: the inability to believe that time is real. It is this inability which makes them so romantic about the nature of society, and it is this inability which has led them into a total confusion about the nature of experience.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Price of the Ticket
It is not Bigger whom we fear, since his appearance among us makes our victory certain. It is the others, who smile, who go to church, who give no cause for complaint, whom we sometimes consider with amusement, with pity, even with affection--and in whose faces we sometimes surprise the merest arrogant hint of hatred, the faintest, withdrawn, speculative shadow of contempt--who make us uneasy; whom we cajole, threaten, flatter, fear; who to us remain unknown, though we are not (we feel with both relief and hostility and with bottomless confusion) unknown to them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
But don’t lose heart, dear ones -- don’t lose heart. Don’t let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Why am I going home? he asked himself. But he knew why. It was time. In order not to lose all that he had gained, he had to move forward and risk it all.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country