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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Writer
Honest
Literature
Good
Men
Honesty

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.
James A. Baldwin
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The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
James A. Baldwin
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It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
James A. Baldwin
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
James A. Baldwin
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Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
James A. Baldwin
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Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
James A. Baldwin
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
James A. Baldwin
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
James A. Baldwin
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I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.
James A. Baldwin
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We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
James A. Baldwin
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Somebody, said Jacques, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
James A. Baldwin
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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
James A. Baldwin
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You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
James A. Baldwin
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To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
James A. Baldwin
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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
James A. Baldwin
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To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it fears must be faced.
James A. Baldwin
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
James A. Baldwin
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James A. Baldwin