Quote

A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.

James A. Baldwin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James A. Baldwin
Searching
Changing
Writer
Real
Always
Shifting

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

Image
At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James A. Baldwin
Image
A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
James A. Baldwin
Image
I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.
James A. Baldwin
Image
I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Employment is my right my destiny.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
James A. Baldwin
Image
She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.
James A. Baldwin
Image
But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament it was a matter of punishment and grief.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
James A. Baldwin
Image
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
James A. Baldwin
Image
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
James A. Baldwin