James Arthur Baldwin (1924–87) was an American novelist and civil-rights activist. He achieved international recognition for his bold expressions of the predicament and aspirations of African American life in the 1950s and 1960s.
Born in Harlem, New York City, Baldwin started preaching in revivalist churches at the age of 14. This experience inspired his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1954.) Baldwin wrote it with the help of the African-American writer Richard Wright. Set in Harlem, it was semi-autobiographical and became an American classic.
Go Tell It on the Mountain was followed by such novels as Giovanni’s Room (1956,) Another Country (1962,) and Just Above My Head (1979)—all deliberate both homosexuality and the condition of African Americans.
Baldwin also wrote short stories, political and autobiographical essays, and plays. The Fire Next Time (1963) was a campaigning work for the American civil rights movement. None of his other later works achieved the popular and critical success of his early work. His influence on other American artists—such as singer Nina Simone, novelist Maya Angelou, novelist Toni Morrison—whether of spirit, love, or style, is undeniable.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by James Baldwin
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Children
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Attention, Failure
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Society
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Love
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Forgiveness, Future, Challenges, Present, The Present, Time
An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger. Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Identity
Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Exile
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Generations, Teamwork, Teams
As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you. Because as long as you think you’re white, I’m forced to think I’m black.
—James Baldwin
The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Education
James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.
—James Baldwin
Topics: History
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Questions, Questioning
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Education
Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Anger
He loved this street [42nd Street], not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Libraries
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Freedom
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
—James Baldwin
We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Men & Women
Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Perspective
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Love
Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Humanity
It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Giving, Charity
The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
—James Baldwin
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Acceptance
Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Freedom
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Belief, Beliefs
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Change, Miscellaneous, Win, Action
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