American novelist (1960- )
I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.
JAMES BALDWIN
"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962
An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Time: the whisper beneath that word is death.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The best that he had ever managed in bed, so far, had been the maximum of relief with the minimum of hostility.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES BALDWIN
"As Much Truth As One Can Bear", New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962
In any of the world’s cities, on a winter night, a boy can be bought for the price of a beer and the promise of warm blankets.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The tendrils of shame clutched at them, however they turned, all the dirty words they knew commented on all they did.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood–one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
See, I couldn't stand these chicks I was making it with, and I was working real hard at my music, and man, I was lonely. You come off a gig, you be tired, and you'd already taken as much sh*t as you could stand from the managers and the people in the room you were working and you'd be off to make some down scene with some pasty white-faced b*tch. And so you'd make the scene and somehow you'd wake up in the morning and the chick would be beside you, alive and well, and dying to make the scene again and somehow you'd manage not to strangle her.
JAMES BALDWIN
Blues for Mister Charlie
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
Yes, he had been there: chafing and pushing and pounding, trying to awaken a frozen girl. The battle was awful because the girl wished to be awakened but was terrified of the unknown. Every movement that seemed to bring her closer to him, to bring them closer together, had its violent recoil, driving them farther apart. Both clung to a fantasy rather than to each other, tried to suck pleasure from the crannies of the mind, rather than surrender the secrets of the body.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Our people" have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country