James Baldwin Quotes
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The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
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Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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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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The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.
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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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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.
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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.
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If any white man in the world says, 'Give me liberty or give me death,' the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won't be any more like him.
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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. … Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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I knew Richard Wright and I loved him. ... I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself.
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If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.