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A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Always
Shifting
Searching
Changing
Writer
Real

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
James A. Baldwin
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After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.
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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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity
James A. Baldwin
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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
James A. Baldwin
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Writing is a political instrument.
James A. Baldwin
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Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
James A. Baldwin
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Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.
James A. Baldwin
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I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
James A. Baldwin
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If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
James A. Baldwin
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
James A. Baldwin
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
James A. Baldwin
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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
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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 A. Baldwin
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All racists are irresponsible.
James A. Baldwin
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Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
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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Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
James A. Baldwin
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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
James A. Baldwin
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Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.
James A. Baldwin