James Baldwin Quotes

James Baldwin

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 2, 1924

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

James Baldwin

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.

James Baldwin

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

James Baldwin

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 Baldwin

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

James Baldwin

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.

James Baldwin

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

James Baldwin

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.

James Baldwin

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

James Baldwin

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

James Baldwin

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

James Baldwin

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

James Baldwin

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

James Baldwin

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

James Baldwin

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

James Baldwin

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

James Baldwin

People can cry much easier than they can change.

James Baldwin

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

James Baldwin

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

James Baldwin

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

James Baldwin