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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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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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.
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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
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The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
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What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
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.
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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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Great art can only be created out of love.
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Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin
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We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
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It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.
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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
James A. Baldwin
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All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
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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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
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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.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
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