Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James A. Baldwin
Would
Childhood
Dismiss
Time
Certainly
Bleak
Novel
Novels
Learned
Usual
Story
Observation
Read
Began
Living
Fantasy
Plotting
Stories
Consider
Restrained

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

Image
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
Image
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.
James A. Baldwin
Image
We can make America what America must become.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Artists are here to disturb the peace.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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
The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. - James Baldwin, The Creative Process
James A. Baldwin
Image
An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
James A. Baldwin
Image
One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
James A. Baldwin
Image
I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years
James A. Baldwin
Image
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
James A. Baldwin
Image
There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin
Image
A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
James A. Baldwin
Image
To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
James A. Baldwin
Image
A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
James A. Baldwin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You don't need numbers you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
James A. Baldwin