James Baldwin

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

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.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

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.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

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