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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

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Write
Terribly
Enough
Perform
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Writing
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.
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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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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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 A. Baldwin
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Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
James A. Baldwin
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
James A. Baldwin
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One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
James A. Baldwin
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A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
James A. Baldwin
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People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
James A. Baldwin
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
James A. Baldwin
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
James A. Baldwin
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A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.
James A. Baldwin
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Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
James A. Baldwin
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
James A. Baldwin
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Society is held together by our need we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
James A. Baldwin
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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James A. Baldwin