I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
~ James Baldwin

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I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
~ James Baldwin

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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

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Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
~ James Baldwin

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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
~ James Baldwin

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

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Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
~ James Baldwin

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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.
~ James Baldwin

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The celebrity never sees himself. I have some idea what I’m doing on that stage; above all, I have some idea what sustains me on that stage. But the celebrity is not exactly Jimmy, though he comes out of Jimmy and Jimmy nourishes that, too. I can see now, with hindsight, that I would’ve had to become a celebrity in order to survive.
~ James Baldwin

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