787 Quotes by James Baldwin

The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

It’s funny about people. Just before something happens, you almost know what it is. You do know what it is, I believe. You just haven’t had the time – and now you won’t have the time – to say it to yourself.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child – by what means? – a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.

They are just dirty, all of them, low and cheap and dirty.′ He stretched out his hand and pulled me down to the floor beside him. ‘All except you. Tous, sauf toi.’ He held my face between his hands and I supposed such tenderness has scarcely ever produced such terror as I then felt. ‘Ne me laisse pas tomber, je t’en prie,’ he said, and kissed me, with a strange insistent gentleness on the mouth.

Employment is my right my destiny.