James A. Baldwin Quotes About Literature
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Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
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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.
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No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
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The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
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To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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