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I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
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Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James A. Baldwin
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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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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
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Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
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It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.
James A. Baldwin
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When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
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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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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.
James A. Baldwin
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
James A. Baldwin
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The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
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A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
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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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