James A. Baldwin Quotes
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If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
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Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
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The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
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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.
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Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.