James A. Baldwin Quotes About Language
-
When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
→ -
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
→ -
Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.
→
Related Authors
-
Gwendolyn Brooks Poet -
Richard Wright Author -
Toni Morrison Novelist -
Nikki Giovanni Writer -
Amiri Baraka Writer -
Margaret Mead Cultural Anthropologist -
Malcolm X Human rights activist -
Eldridge Cleaver Writer -
Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil rights activist -
Lorraine Hansberry Playwright -
Flannery O'Connor Writer -
Langston Hughes Poet -
Maya Angelou Author -
Ta-Nehisi Coates Writer -
Alice Walker Author -
Nina Simone Singer -
Henry James Writer -
Ralph Ellison Novelist -
W. E. B. Du Bois Historian -
Zora Neale Hurston Anthropologist