787 Quotes by James Baldwin

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky.

I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart.

But I felt that it was my heart which was broken. Something had broken in me to make me so cold and so perfectly still and far away.

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

So what can we really do for each other except--just love each other and be each other's witness? And haven't we got the right to hope--for more? So that we can really stretch into whoever we really are?

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of 'Success.

Nobody can stay in the Garden of Eden.

He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear.