Quotes from James Baldwin

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

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.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.

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

Most people in action are not worth very much; and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex; you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

It is a great shock at the age of 5 or 6 to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth, and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

...the question isn't whether you're happy or unhappy but alive or dead.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.

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.

Tell me, he said, What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for? Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel. And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life

Somebody, said Jacques, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.