American novelist (1960- )
The conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American, be he/she legally or actually Black or White ... I was trying to locate myself within a specific inheritance and to use that inheritance, precisely, to claim the birthright from which that inheritance had so brutally and specifically excluded me.
JAMES BALDWIN
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preface to the 1984 edition, Notes of a Native Son
I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I do not expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.
JAMES BALDWIN
Harper's, October 1958
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.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Devil Finds Work
People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
I think you’ve got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there’s no possibility of achieving the life you want.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
JAMES BALDWIN
interview with Julius Lester, New York Times, May 27, 1984
The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
He was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt.
JAMES BALDWIN
Autobiographical Notes
In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found -- and it is found in terrible places.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
And he knew again that she was not saying everything she meant; in a kind of secret language she was telling him today something that he must remember and understand tomorrow.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain