American novelist (1960- )
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.
JAMES BALDWIN
"A Negro Assays on the Negro Mood", New York Times, March 12, 1961
You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
JAMES BALDWIN
interview with Julius Lester, New York Times, May 27, 1984
It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Price of the Ticket
How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
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.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.
JAMES BALDWIN
Blues for Mister Charlie
I watch the men in the hospital, in the streets--some of these men are pretty awful people, they really are slimy sewer scum, do anything to pay down on the car, to meet the damn car payments--they don't care about women, or men, or nobody. It just seems so hopeless.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Something like lust, something like hatred, seems to hover in the air along the country roads, shifting like mist or steam, but always there, gripping the city streets like fog, making every corner a dangerous corner.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Time: the word tolled like the bells of a church.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
His dangerous, overwhelming lust for life had failed to involve him in anything deeper than perhaps half a dozen extremely casual acquaintanceships in about as many bars.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
Bigger dreams of some black man who will weld all blacks together into a mighty fist.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Devil Finds Work
One of the most American of attributes: the inability to believe that time is real. It is this inability which makes them so romantic about the nature of society, and it is this inability which has led them into a total confusion about the nature of experience.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son