Quotes from James Baldwin

We crossed crowded Sixth Avenue, all kinds of people out hunting for Saturday night.

And in Uncle Tom's Cabin we may find foreshadowing of both: the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power.

it was a little bit like being hit by a truck ... but it was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me.

Nor can you get a meal anywhere in the South without being confronted with "grits"; a pale, lumpy, tasteless kind of porridge which the Southerner insists is a delicacy but which I believe they ingest as punishment for their sins.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.

Americans are the most inarticulate, illiterate people I've ever met, totally unlettered in the language of the heart, totally distrustful of whatever cannot be touched.

Most contemporary fiction, like most contemporary theater, is designed to corroborate your fantasies and make you walk out whistling. I don't want you to whistle at my stuff, baby. I want you to be sitting on the edge of your chair waiting for nurses to carry you out.

I write because... every writer has only one story to tell, really, and I haven't told mine yet.

I was learning then that the terrible thing about being a writer is that you don't decide to be one, you discover that you are one.

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

Experience which destroys innocence also leads one back to it.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.

There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world, it is better than bombing one out of it.