Quotes About Baldwin

I go to 'SNL' with Alec. I literally watch on a feed from his room. I'm not in the audience. I watch in his room. I get so cozy.

was also witty and likable, intelligent

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

And then: 'Here comes your baby. Sois sage. Sois chic.' He moved slightly away and began talking to the boy next to him. And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars.

We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink.

Of course, I must say that I don't think America is God's gift to anybody—if it is, God's days have got to be numbered. That God these people say they serve—and do serve, in ways that they don't know—has got a very nasty sense of humor. Like you'd beat the shit out of Him, if He was a man. Or: if you were.

Reading a Baldwin sentence can feel like recreating thought itself. One has to take hands off the rudder and trust the river of thought as it flows.

His courtesy is as real as her trouble.

I think one of the things that started to hinder Baldwin as an artist later on was that he became really aware of power, so he wanted it, too. But if you look at the work before that, before 'The Fire Next Time' put him on the cover of 'Time Magazine,' it was much more intimate and a much more internal conversation.

Don't even get me started on James Baldwin!" Esteban wailed. "The man . . . the prophet . . . the poet laureate who wrote the liturgy of his entire race, and his people won't celebrate his queer spirit!

I grew up taking the Long Island Railroad from Baldwin, New York into Penn Station and walking upstairs to Madison Square Garden. Those are some of my favorite memories.

I was living out on Long Island in Baldwin, New York when Hurricane Sandy hit. With the storm surge, the whole first floor of our house was under about three feet of water. We lost a lot of valuable stuff - sentimental stuff like pictures and Christmas ornaments. Nobody expected flooding that bad.

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

It's one of the many reasons that I go to sleep and wake up with thoughts of authorship. Who writes our stories? Who chronicles our tales of cooking it, playing it, writing it? Baldwin, Gordon, the Apollo, Jacob Lawrence, Paul Mooney, James Brown, Malcolm - that's my neighborhood. Why wouldn't I want to cook for the people who lived there?

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

As Baldwin writes: 'the bombing raids' indiscriminate destruction, blighting Bloomsbury as thoroughly as Brixton, prepared the ground psychologically for a wider sharing of risks.

James Baldwin's "Stranger in the Village" (1953) describes a winter's stay in an isolated Swiss hamlet called Leukerbad. I have known that essay almost as long as I've known Faulkner's own work, and I never reread it without a sense of profound discomfort, an uneasiness with American life and my own cushioned place within it.

the only one with an ear for prose who could follow his arguments about why Flannery O'Conner and Grace Paley were bolder, more inventive stylists than Bellow, Updike, or any other American man except perhaps Baldwin,