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James Baldwin

b: New York, New York, Aug 2, 1924

d: Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France., Nov 30, 1987

American. Author. Described black life in US; best known work Go Tell It On the Mountain; 1953.

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

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.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck – but, most of all, endurance.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them..

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.

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

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

I imagine that one of the reasons that people cling to their hates so stubbornly is becaue they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with the pain.

I love america more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

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

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

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.

It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

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

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

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and now we cannot live within.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didnt have it and thought of other things if you did.

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.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. and they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.

The american ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

The future is like heaven – everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power – and no one holds power forever.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

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.

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

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck – but, most of all, endurance.

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

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.