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I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
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He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
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You write in order to change the world.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.
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The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
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A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
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We can make America what America must become.
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We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
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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.
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
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It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
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People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.
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Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
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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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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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