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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
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There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
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There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
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Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
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When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
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A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.
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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.
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He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
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