American novelist (1960- )
There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood–one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.
JAMES BALDWIN
"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962
But no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
See, I couldn't stand these chicks I was making it with, and I was working real hard at my music, and man, I was lonely. You come off a gig, you be tired, and you'd already taken as much sh*t as you could stand from the managers and the people in the room you were working and you'd be off to make some down scene with some pasty white-faced b*tch. And so you'd make the scene and somehow you'd wake up in the morning and the chick would be beside you, alive and well, and dying to make the scene again and somehow you'd manage not to strangle her.
JAMES BALDWIN
Blues for Mister Charlie
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES BALDWIN
"As Much Truth As One Can Bear", New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
It was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knowest this man's fall, but thou knowest not his wrassling.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him—for that is what it is—is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous—dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The best that he had ever managed in bed, so far, had been the maximum of relief with the minimum of hostility.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Our people" have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
When my bed get empty, make me feel awful mean and blue.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country