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
People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
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
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
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
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
The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Devil Finds Work
He was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
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
It is the question of Bigger's humanity which is at stake, the relationship in which he stands to all other Americans--and, by implication, to all people--and it is precisely this question which it cannot clarify, with which it cannot, in fact, come to any coherent terms. He is the monster created by the American republic, the present awful sum of generations of oppression; but to say that he is a monster is to fall into the trap of making him subhuman and he must, therefore, be made representative of a way of life which is real and human in precise ratio to the degree to which it seems to us monstrous and strange.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
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
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
There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
I watch the men in the hospital, in the streets--some of these men are pretty awful people, they really are slimy sewer scum, do anything to pay down on the car, to meet the damn car payments--they don't care about women, or men, or nobody. It just seems so hopeless.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
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
One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son