James Baldwin quotes

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

I was broke. I got to Paris with forty dollars in my pocket, but I had to get out of New York.

When I arrived in Paris in 1948 I didn’t know a word of French. I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t want to know anyone.

My reflexes were tormented by the plight of other people.

It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France—it was a matter of getting out of America. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in France but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York.

If I had stayed there, I would have gone under, like my friend on the George Washington Bridge.

I went through this period where I was very much alone, and wanted to be.

Looking for a place to live. Looking for a job. You begin to doubt your judgment, you begin to doubt everything. You become imprecise. And that’s when you’re beginning to go under.

The whole society has decided to make you nothing. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.

I’ve been compelled in some ways by describing my circumstances to learn to live with them. It’s not the same thing as accepting them.

Given the conditions in this country to be a black writer was impossible.

I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.

I’d been a preacher for three years, from age fourteen to seventeen. Those were three years which probably turned me to writing.

I would improvise from the texts, like a jazz musician improvises from a theme.

You have to sense the people you’re talking to. You have to respond to what they hear.

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

It was that or nothing, since in my own mind I was the father of my family.

On the roads I traveled and the streets I ran, anything could have happened to a boy like me—in New York. Sleeping on rooftops and in the subways.

Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.

Love him, love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

Somebody, 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.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.