Quotes from James Baldwin

Simplicity is king. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal. (in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review)

For shame! For shame! that I should be so abruptly, so hideosuly entangled with a boy; what was strange was that this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human tangle, occurring everywhere, without end, forever.

My life on the Left is of absolute no interest. It did not last long. It was useful in that I learned that it may be impossible to indoctrinate me; also, revolutionaries tend to be sentimental and I hope that I am not.

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

while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything.

I've got to accept limitations before I can discover my possibilities.

Fear and love cannot long remain in the same bed together. And how many nights I lay there, while Barbara slept, filled with an indescribable bewilderment; feeling that all that held me to life was being gnawed away, and feeling myself sink, like a weighted corpse, deeper and deeper in the sea of uncertainty.

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. --"The Crusade of Indignation," in Nation

They come through Ellis Island, where Giorgio becomes Joe, Pappavasiliu becomes Palmer, Evangelos becomes Evans, Goldsmith becomes Smith or Gold, and Avakian becomes King. So, with a painless change of name, and in the twinkling of an eye, one becomes a white American.

I began, perhaps, to be lonely that summer and began, that summer, the flight which has brought me to this darkening window. And yet - when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds oneself pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors.

I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require my captivity song; They require of me a song less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own.

You win. You're the philosopher.

She was like a wild animal who didn't know whether to come to the outstretched hand or to flee and kept making startled little rushes, first in one direction and then in the other.

As your experience about writing accrues) you learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn't know you had.

Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology, as you put it, because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.

You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. (...) How can I say what it feels like? I don't know. I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to and spend all my time trying to forget it? I don't want to hate anybody - but now maybe, I can't love anybody either - are we friends? Can we really be friends?

Anyway, Giovanni's Room is not really about homosexuality. It's the vehicle through which the book moves. Go Tell It on the Mountain, for example, is not about a church, and Giovanni is not really about homosexuality. It's about what happens to you if you're afraid to love anybody. Which is much more interesting than the question of homosexuality.

But it's not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can't forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the world forever. It's not possible to forget anybody you've destroyed.

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

To act is to commit, and to commit is to take risks.

Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on the how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. - Autobiographical Notes

The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the distances they had yet to cover before arriving at that maturity which makes love possible—or no longer possible—could not be considered their fault. They had been born into a society in which nothing was harder to achieve, in which perhaps nothing was more scorned and feared than the idea of the soul's maturity.

I am proud of these people not because of their colour but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty.