James Baldwin Quotes - Page 2

Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.

…this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality…

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

People can cry much easier than they can change.

You don't know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt you and so I didn't write. But now I feel like a man who's been trying to climb up out of some deep, really deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside.

Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.