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We Cannot Discuss The State Of Our Minorities Until We First Have Some Sense Of What We Are, Who We Are, What Our Goals Are, And What We Take Life To Be. The Question Is Not What We Can Do Now For The Hypothetical Mexican, The Hypothetical Negro. The Question Is What We Really Want Out Of Life, For Ourselves, What We Think Is Real.

-James A. Baldwin

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We Cannot Discuss The

James A. Baldwin

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We Cannot Discuss The State Of Our Minorities Until We First Have Some Sense Of What We Are, Who We Are, What Our Goals Are, And What We Take Life To Be. The Question Is Not What We Can Do Now For The Hypothetical Mexican, The Hypothetical Negro. The Question Is What We Really Want Out Of Life, For Ourselves, What We Think Is Real.

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Love Him And Let Him Love You. Do You Think Anything Else Under Heaven Really Matters?

I Was Guilty And Irritated And Full Of Love And Pain. I Wanted To Kick Him And I Wanted To Take Him In My Arms.

Talent Is Insignificant. I Know A Lot Of Talented Ruins. Beyond Talent Lie All The Usual Words: Discipline, Love, Luck, But, Most Of All, Endurance.

It Is A Very Grave Matter To Be Forced To Imitate A People For Whom You Know-which Is The Price Of Your Performance And Survival-you Do Not Exist. It Is Hard To Imitate A People Whose Existence Appears, Mainly, To Be Made Tolerable By Their Bottomless Gratitude That They Are Not, Thank Heaven, You.

One Writes Out Of One Thing Only - One's Own Experience. Everything Depends On How Relentlessly One Forces From This Experience The Last Drop, Sweet Or Bitter, It Can Possibly Give. This Is The Only Real Concern Of The Artist, To Recreate Out Of The Disorder Of Life That Order Which Is Art.

All Racists Are Irresponsible.

You Write In Order To Change The World ... If You Alter, Even By A Millimeter, The Way People Look At Reality, Then You Can Change It.

Freaks Are Called Freaks And Are Treated As They Are Treated – In The Main, Abominably – Because They Are Human Beings Who Cause To Echo, Deep Within Us, Our Most Profound Terrors And Desires.

The Writer's Only Real Task: To Recreate Out Of The Disorder Of Life That Order Which Is Art

If One Cannot Risk Oneself, Then One Is Simply Incapable Of Giving. And, After All, One Can Give Freedom Only By Setting Someone Free.

You Don’t Have A Home Until You Leave It And Then, When You Have Left It, You Never Can Go Back.

Rage Can Only With Difficulty, And Never Entirely, Be Brought Under The Domination Of The Intelligence, And Therefore Is Not Susceptible To Any Arguments Whatsoever.

A Civilization Is Not Destroyed By Wicked People; It Is Not Necessary That People Be Wicked But Only That They Be Spineless.

It Is A Very Rare Man Who Does Not Victimize The Helpless.

We Are Responsible For The World In Which We Find Ourselves, If Only Because We Are The Only Sentient Force Which Can Change It.

To Be Born In A Free Society And Not To Be Born Free Is To Be Born Into A Lie. To Be Told By Co-citizens And Co-christians That You Have No Value, No History, Have Never Done Anything That Is Worthy Of Human Respect Destroys You Because In The Beginning You Believe It.

Money, It Turned Out, Was Exactly Like Sex, You Thought Of Nothing Else If You Didn't Have It And Thought Of Other Things If You Did.

The Occurrence Of An Event Is Not The Same Thing As Knowing What It Is That One Has Lived Through. Most People Had Not Lived -- Nor Could It, For That Matter, Be Said That They Had Died-- Through Any Of Their Terrible Events. They Had Simply Been Stunned By The Hammer. They Passed Their Lives Thereafter In A Kind Of Limbo Of Denied And Unexamined Pain. The Great Question That Faced Him This Morning Was Whether Or Not Had Had Ever, Really, Been Present At His Life.

Terrible Events

Not Only Was I Not Born To Be A Slave; I Was Not Born To Hope To Become The Equal Of The Slave Master.

European Society Has Always Been Divided Into Classes In A Way That American Society Never Has Been. A European Writer Considers Himself To Be Part Of An Old And Honorable Tradition--of Intellectual Activity, Of Letters--and His Choice Of A Vocation Does Not Cause Him Any Uneasy Wonder As To Whether Or Not It Will Cost Him All His Friends. But This Tradition Does Not Exist In America.

It Seems To Me That One Ought To Rejoice In The Fact Of Death-- Ought To Decide, Indeed, To Earn One's Death By Confronting With Passion The Conundrum Of Life. One Is Responsible To Life: It Is The Small Beacon In That Terrifying Darkness From Which We Come And To Which We Shall Return. One Must Negotiate This Passage As Nobly As Possible, For The Sake Of Those Who Are Coming After Us.

Fonny And I Just Sat There... While The Voices Of The Congregation Rose And Rose Around Us, Without Mercy... Teddy Had The Tambourine, And Gave The Cue To The Piano Player-i Never Got To Know Him: A Long Dark, Evil-looking Brother, With Hands Made For Strangling; And With These Hands He Attacked The Keyboard Like He Was Beating The Brains Out Of Someone He Remembered. No Doubt The Congregation Had Their Memories, Too, And They Went To Pieces. The Church Began To Rock.

Women Manage, Quite Brilliantly, On The Whole, And To Stunning And Unforeseeable Effect, To Survive And Surmount Being Defined By Others. They Dismiss The Definition, However Dangerous Or Wounding It May Be-- Or Even, Sometimes, Find A Way To Utilize It.

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.

For, While The Tale Of How We Suffer, And How We Are Delighted, And How We May Triumph Is Never New, It Always Must Be Heard. There Isn't Any Other Tale To Tell, It's The Only Light We've Got In All This Darkness.

When You're Writing You're Trying To Find Out Something Which You Don't Know.

I Remember Standing On A Street Corner With The Black Painter Beauford Delaney Down In The Village, Waiting For The Light To Change, And He Pointed Down And Said, 'look.' I Looked And All I Saw Was Water. And He Said, 'look Again,' Which I Did, And I Saw Oil On The Water And The City Reflected In The Puddle. It Was A Great Revelation To Me. I Can't Explain It. He Taught Me How To See, And How To Trust What I Saw. Painters Have Often Taught Writers How To See. And Once You've Had That Experience, You See Differently.

Every Legend, Moreover, Contains Its Residuum Of Truth, And The Root Function Of Language Is To Control The Universe By Describing It.

There Is No Way Of Conveying To The Corpse The Reasons You Have Made Him One--you Have The Corpse, And You Are, Thereafter, At Themercy Of A Fact Which Missed The Truth, Which Means That The Corpse Has You.

If One Really Wishes To Know How Justice Is Administered In A Country, One Does Not Question The Policemen, The Lawyers, The Judges, Or The Protected Members Of The Middle Class. One Goes To The Unprotected - Those, Precisely, Who Need The Law's Protection Most! - And Listens To Their Testimony.

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.

Recognizing A Problem Doesn't Always Bring A Solution, But Until We Recognize That Problem, There Can Be No Solution.

Secrets Hidden At The Heart Of Midnight Are Simply Waiting To Be Dragged To The Light, As, On Some Unlucky High Noon, They Always Are. But Secrets Shrouded In The Glare Of Candor Are Bound To Defeat Even The Most Determined And Agile Inspector For The Light Is Always Changing And Proves That The Eye Cannot Be Trusted.

The Civilized Have Created The Wretched, Quite Coldly And Deliberately, And Do Not Intend To Change The Status Quo; Are Responsible For Their Slaughter And Enslavement; Rain Down Bombs On Defenseless Children Whenever And Wherever They Decide That Their "vital Interests" Are Menaced, And Think Nothing Of Torturing A Man To Death: These People Are Not To Be Taken Seriously When They Speak Of The "sanctity" Of Human Life, Or The "conscience" Of The Civilized World.

An American Negro, However Deep His Sympathies, Or However Bright His Rage, Ceases To Be Simply A Black Man When He Faces A Black Man From Africa.

Then I Buckled Up My Shoes, And I Started.

I Had Never Before Thought Of How Awful The Relationship Must Be Between The Musician And His Instrument. He Has To Fill It, This Instrument, With The Breath Of Life, His Own. He Has To Make It Do What He Wants It To Do. And A Piano Is Just A Piano. It's Made Out Of So Much Wood And Wires And Little Hammers And Big Ones, And Ivory. While There's Only So Much You Can Do With It, The Only Way To Find This Out Is To Try; To Try And Make It Do Everything.

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In My Case, I Think My Exile Saved My Life, For It Inexorably Confirmed Something Which Americans Appear To Have Great Difficulty Accepting. Which Is, Simply, This: A Man Is Not A Man Until He Is Able And Willing To Accept His Own Vision Of The World, No Matter How Radically This Vision Departs From Others.

Do I Really Want To Be Integrated Into A Burning House?

If You Think Too Far Ahead, If You Even Try To Think Too Far Ahead, You'll Never Make It.

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I Think That The Inability To Love Is The Central Problem, Because That Inability Masks A Certain Terror, And That Terror Is The Terror Of Being Touched. And If You Can't Be Touched, You Can't Be Changed. And If You Can't Be Changed, You Can't Be Alive.

Inability To Love

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Individual Effort

Americans, Unhappily, Have The Most Remarkable Ability To Alchemize All Bitter Truths Into An Innocuous But Piquant Confection And To Transform Their Moral Contradictions, Or Public Discussion Of Such Contradictions, Into A Proud Decoration, Such As Are Given For Heroism On The Field Of Battle.

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God Be Thanked For Books! They Are The Voices Of The Distant And The Dead.

One Day, To Everyone’s Astonishment, Someone Drops A Match In The Powder Keg And Everything Blows Up.

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Identity Would Seem To Be The Garment With Which One Covers The Nakedness Of The Self: In Which Case, It Is Best That The Garment Be Loose, A Little Like The Robes Of The Desert, Through Which One's Nakedness Can Always Be Felt, And, Sometimes, Discerned. This Trust In One's Nakedness Is All That Gives One The Power To Change One's Robes.

I Am Certainly Convinced That It Is One Of The Greatest Impulses Of Mankind To Arrive At Something Higher Than A Natural State.

Nakedness Has No Color: This Can Come As News Only To Those Who Have Never Covered, Or Been Covered By, Another Naked Human Being.

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.

We Cannot Discuss The State Of Our Minorities Until We First Have A Sense Of What We Are, Who We Are, What Our Goals Are, And What We Take Life To Be.

If The Relationship Of Father To Son Could Really Be Reduced To Biology, The Whole Earth Would Blaze With The Glory Of Fathers And Sons.

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Negro Servants Have Been Smuggling Odds And Ends Out Of White Homes For Generations, And White People Have Been Delighted To Have Them Do It, Because It Has Assuaged A Dim Guilt And Testified To The Intrinsic Superiority Of White People.

The Purpose Of Education...is To Create In A Person The Ability To Look At The World For Himself, To Make His Own Decisions.

My Friend Was About To Introduce Me When She Looked At Me And Smiled And Said, "whose Little Boy Are You?"

African American

You Don't Need Numbers; You Need Passion, And This Is Proven By The History Of The World!

Be Careful What You Set Your Heart Upon - For It Will Surely Be Yours.

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.

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 Challenge Is In The Moment; The Time Is Always Now.

Live In The Moment

... Every Human Being Is An Unprecedented Miracle.

I Often Wonder What I'd Do If There Weren't Any Books In The World.

At Four O'clock In The Morning, When Everyone Is Drunk Enough, Then Extraordinary Things Can Happen.

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.

Education Is Indoctrination If You're White - Subjugation If You're Black.

I Will No Longer Take Anyone's Word For My Experience.

I Can't Believe What You Say, Because I See What You Do.

No One Knows Very Much About The Life Of Another. This Ignorance Becomes Vivid, If You Love Another. Love Sets The Imagination On Fire, And, Also, Eventually, Chars The Imagination Into A Harder Element: Imagination Cannot Match Love, Cannot Plunge So Deep, Or Range So Wide.

A Writer Has To Take All The Risks Of Putting Down What He Sees.

To Be With God Is Really To Be Involved In Some Enormous, Overwhelming Desire, And Joy, And Power Which You Cannot Control, Which Controls You.

Overwhelming Desire

There Are Few Things Under Heaven More Unnerving Than The Silent, Accumulating Contempt And Hatred Of A People.

The Role Of The Artist Is Exactly The Same As The Role Of The Lover. If I Love You, I Have To Make You Conscious Of The Things You Don’t See.

It Is Dangerous To Be An American Negro Male. America Has Never Wanted Its Negroes To Be Men, And Does Not, Generally, Treat Them As Men. It Treats Them As Mascots, Pets, Or Things.

The Future Is Like Heaven-everyone Exalts It But No One Wants To Go There Now.

When Human Rights Are Abused On A Grand Scale, The Broth Of Purity Boils And Feeds The Rebellion Of A New Order.

People Are Continually Pointing Out To Me The Wretchedness Of White People In Order To Console Me For The Wretchedness Of Blacks. But An Itemized Account Of The American Failure Does Not Console Me And It Should Not Console Anyone Else. That Hundreds Of Thousands Of White People Are Living, In Effect, No Better Than The "niggers" Is Not A Fact To Be Regarded With Complacency. The Social And Moral Bankruptcy Suggested By This Fact Is Of The Bitterest, Most Terrifying Kind.

The States Of Birth, Suffering, Love, And Death, Are Extreme States: Extreme, Universal, And Inescapable. We All Know This, But We Would Rather Not Know It. The Artist Is Present To Correct The Delusions To Which We Are All Prey In Our Attempts To Avoid This Knowledge." - James Baldwin, "the Creative Process

I Think White Gay People Feel Cheated Because They Were Born, In Principle, In A Society In Which They Were Supposed To Be Safe. The Anomaly Of Their Sexuality Puts Them In Danger, Unexpectedly.

Hatred Destroys The Person Who Hates.

James Joyce Is Right About History Being A Nightmare-- But It May Be That Nightmare From Which No One Can Awaken. People Are Trapped In History And History In Trapped In Them.

A Person Does Not Lightly Elect To Oppose His Society. One Would Much Rather Be At Home Among One's Compatriots Than Be Mocked And Detested By Them. And There Is A Level On Which The Mockery Of People, Even Their Hatred, Is Moving, Because It Is So Blind: It Is Terrible To Watch People Cling To Their Captivity And Insist On Their Own Destruction.

Allegiance, After All, Has To Work Two Ways; And One Can Grow Weary Of An Allegiance Which Is Not Reciprocal.

All Of Africa Will Be Free Before We Can Get A Lousy Cup Of Coffee.

We Do Not Trust Educated People And Rarely, Alas, Produce Them, For We Do Not Trust The Independence Of Mind Which Alone Makes A Genuine Education Possible.

Whoever Is Born In New York Is Ill-equipped To Deal With Any Other City: All Other Cities Seem, At Best, A Mistake, And, At Worst, A Fraud. No Other City Is So Spitefully Incoherent.

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.

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.

It Is Astonishing That In A Country So Devoted To The Individual, So Many People Should Be Afraid To Speak.

Perhaps, As We Say In America, I Wanted To Find Myself. This Is An Interesting Phrase, Not Current As Far As I Know In The Language Of Any Other People, Which Certainly Does Not Mean What It Says But Betrays A Nagging Suspicion That Something Has Been Misplaced. I Think Now That If I Had Any Intimation That The Self I Was Going To Find Would Turn Out To Be Only The Same Self From Which I Had Spent So Much Time In Flight, I Would Have Stayed At Home.

The American Ideal Is, After All, That Everyone Should Be As Much Alike As Possible.

Drive To The Heart Of Every Answer And Expose The Question The Answer Hides.

To Be A Negro In This Country And To Be Relatively Conscious Is To Be In A Rage Almost All The Time.

African American

Nobody Is More Dangerous Than He Who Imagines Himself Pure In Heart; For His Purity, By Definition, Is Unassailable.

An Identity Is Questioned Only When It Is Menaced, As When The Mighty Begin To Fall, Or When The Wretched Begin To Rise, Or When The Stranger Enters The Gates, Never, Thereafter, To Be A Stranger.

You Don't Realize That You're Intelligent Until It Gets You Into Trouble.

But To Look Back From The Stony Plain Along The Road Which Led One To That Place Is Not At All The Same Thing As Walking On The Road; The Perspective To Say The Very Least, Changes Only With The Journey; Only When The Road Has, All Abruptly And Treacherously, And With An Absoluteness That Permits No Argument, Turned Or Dropped Or Risen Is One Able To See All That One Could Not Have Seen From Any Other Place.

But, When The Chips Are Down, Its Better To Be Furious With Someone You Love, Or Frightened For Someone You Love, Than Be Put Through The Merciless Horror Of Being Ashamed Of Someone You Love.

Someone You Love

And I Was Yet Aware That This Was Only A Moment, That The World Waited Outside, As Hungry As A Tiger, And That Trouble Stretched Above Us, Longer Than The Sky.

A Society Must Assume That It Is Stable, But The Artist Must Know, And He Must Let Us Know, That There Is Nothing Stable Under Heaven.

The World Tends To Trap You In The Role You Play And It Is Always Extremely Hard To Maintain A Watchful, Mocking Distance Between Oneself As One Appears To Be And Oneself As One Actually Is.

It Was As Though We Were A Picture, Trapped In Time: This Had Been Happening For Hundreds Of Years, People Sitting In A Room, Waiting For Dinner, And Listening To The Blues.

Not Everything That Is Faced Can Be Changed. But Nothing Can Be Changed Until It Is Faced.

Unless A Writer Is Extremely Old When He Dies, In Which Case He Has Probably Become A Neglected Institution, His Death Must Always Be Seen As Untimely. This Is Because A Real Writer Is Always Shifting And Changing And Searching. The World Has Many Labels For Him, Of Which The Most Treacherous Is The Label Of Success.

Unless A Writer Is Extremely Old When He Dies, In Which Case He Has Probably Become A Neglected Institution, His Death Must Always Seem Untimely.

People Who Shut Their Eyes To Reality Simply Invite Their Own Destruction, And Anyone Who Insists On Remaining In A State On Innocence Long After That Innocence Is Dead Turns Himself Into A Monster.

The Trick Is To Love Somebody.... If You Love One Person, You See Everybody Else Differently.

The Male Cannot Bear Very Much Humiliation; And He Really Cannot Bear It, It Obliterates Him.

Hatred Is Always Self Hatred, And There Is Something Suicidal About It.

The World Is Before You, And You Need Not Take It Or Leave It As It Was When You Came In.

Whatever You Describe To Another Person Is Also A Revelation Of Who You Are And Who You Think You Are. You Can Not Describe Anything Without Betraying Your Point Of View, Your Aspirations, Your Fears, Your Hopes. Everything.

When You’re Writing, You’re Trying To Find Out Something Which You Don’t Know. The Whole Language Of Writing For Me Is Finding Out What You Don’t Want To Know, What You Don’t Want To Find Out. But Something Forces You To Anyway.

Hatred, Which Could Destroy So Much, Never Failed To Destroy The Man Who Hated, And This Was An Immutable Law.

I've Always Believed That You Can Think Positive Just As Well As You Can Think Negative.

Motivational Sports

Love Takes Off Masks That We Fear We Cannot Live Without And Know We Cannot Live Within.

The Question Of Sexual Dominance Can Exist Only In The Nightmare Of That Soul Which Has Armed Itself, Totally, Against The Possibility Of The Changing Motion Of Conquest And Surrender, Which Is Love.

But The Relationship Of Morality And Power Is A Very Subtle One. Because Ultimately Power Without Morality Is No Longer Power.

The Impossible Is The Least That One Can Demand.

You Want To Write A Sentence As Clean As A Bone. That Is The Goal.

Remember, To Hate, To Be Violent, Is Demeaning. It Means You're Afraid Of The Other Side Of The Coin -- To Love And Be Loved.

I Want To Be An Honest Man And A Good Writer.

I Must Oppose Any Attempt That Negroes May Make To Do To Others What Has Been Done To Them. . . . I Know The Spiritual Wasteland To Which That Road Leads . . . Whoever Debases Others Is Debasing Himself.

It Took Many Years Of Vomiting Up All The Filth I’d Been Taught About Myself, And Half-believed, Before I Was Able To Walk On The Earth As Though I Had A Right To Be Here.

I Am What Time, Circumstance, History, Have Made Of Me, Certainly, But I Am Also, Much More Than That. So Are We All.

African American

It Is Only Because The World Looks On His Talent With Such A Frightening Indifference That The Artist Is Compelled To Make His Talent Important.

People Don't Have Any Mercy. They Tear You Limb From Limb, In The Name Of Love. Then, When You're Dead, When They've Killed You By What They Made You Go Through, They Say You Didn't Have Any Character. They Weep Big, Bitter Tears - Not For You. For Themselves, Because They've Lost Their Toy.

Perhaps Home Is Not A Place But Simply An Irrevocable Condition.

It Is Astonishing The Lengths To Which A Person, Or A People, Will Go In Order To Avoid A Truthful Mirror.

People Pay For What They Do, And Still More For What They Have Allowed Themselves To Become, And They Pay For It, Very Simply, By The Lives They Lead.

People Who Believe That They Are Strong-willed And The Masters Of Their Destiny Can Only Continue To Believe This By Becoming Specialists In Self-deception.

White People Will Have Quite Enough To Do In Learning How To Accept And Love Themselves And Each Other, And When They Have Achieved This - Which Will Not Be Tomorrow And May Very Well Be Never - The Negro Problem Will No Longer Exist, For It Will No Longer Be Needed.

It Must Be Remembered That In Those Great Days I Was Considered To Be An "integrationist" - This Was Never, Quite, My Own Idea Of Myself - And Malcolm Was Considered To Be A "racist In Reverse." This Formulation, In Terms Of Power - And Power Is The Arena In Which Racism Is Acted Out - Means Absolutely Nothing: It May Even Be Described As A Cowardly Formulation. The Powerless, By Definition, Can Never Be "racists," For They Can Never Make The World Pay For What They Feel Or Fear Except By The Suicidal Endeavor Which Makes Them Fanatics Or Revolutionaries, Or Both.

It Is Certain, In Any Case, That Ignorance, Allied With Power, Is The Most Ferocious Enemy Justice Can Have.

A Ghetto Can Be Improved In One Way Only: Out Of Existence.

Years Ago, When He Was Around Fourteen, He'd Been All Hipped On The Idea Of Going To India. He Read Books About People Sitting On Rocks, Naked, In All Kinds Of Weather, But Mostly Bad, Naturally, And Walking Barefoot Through Hot Coals And Arriving At Wisdom. I Used To Say That It Sounded To Me As Though They Were Getting Away From Wisdom As Fast As They Could. I Think He Sort Of Looked Down On Me For That.

The Determination To Outwit One's Situation Means That One Has No Models, Only Object Lessons.

These Boys, Now, Were Living As We'd Been Living Then, They Were Growing Up With A Rush And Their Heads Bumped Abruptly Against The Low Ceiling Of Their Actual Possibilities. They Were Filled With Rage. All They Really Knew Were Two Darknesses, The Darkness Of Their Lives, Which Were Now Closing In On Them, And The Darkness Of The Movies, Which Had Blinded Them To That Other Darkness, And In Which They Now, Vindictively, Dreamed, At Once More Together Than They Were At Any Other Time, And More Alone.

History Is Not A Procession Of Illustrious People. It's About What Happens To A People. Millions Of Anonymous People Is What History Is About.

If You Really Want To Know Something About Solitude, Become Famous.

If I Am Not What You Say I Am, Then You Are Not Who You Think You Are.

There Is A 'sanctity' Involved With Bringing A Child Into This World: It Is Better Than Bombing One Out Of It.

Most Of Us, No Matter What We Say, Are Walking In The Dark, Whistling In The Dark. Nobody Knows What Is Going To Happen To Him From One Moment To The Next, Or How One Will Bear It. This Is Irreducible. And It's True Of Everybody. Now, It Is True That The Nature Of Society Is To Create, Among Its Citizens, An Illusion Of Safety; But It Is Also Absolutely True That The Safety Is Always Necessarily An Illusion. Artists Are Here To Disturb The Peace.

To Be Sensual, I Think, Is To Respect And Rejoice In The Force Of Life, Of Life Itself, And To Be Present In All That One Does, From The Effort Of Loving To The Breaking Of Bread.

We Take Our Shape, It Is True, Within And Against That Cage Of Reality Bequeathed Us At Our Birth; And Yet It Is Precisely Through Our Dependence On This Reality That We Are Most Endlessly Betrayed.

We Are Very Cruelly Trapped Between What We Would Like To Be And What We Actually Are. And We Cannot Possibly Become What We Would Like To Be Until We Are Willing To Ask Ourselves Just Why The Lives We Lead On This Continent Are Mainly So Empty, So Tame, And So Ugly.

The American Ideal Of Sexuality Appears To Be Rooted In The American Ideal Of Masculinity. This Idea Has Created Cowboys And Indians, Good Guys And Bad Guys, Punks And Studs, Tough Guys And Softies, Butch And Faggot, Black And White. It Is An Ideal So Paralytically Infantile That It Is Virtually Forbidden - As An Unpatriotic Act - That The American Boy Evolve Into The Complexity Of Manhood

Black And White

You Have To Decide Who You Are And Force The World To Deal With You, Not With Its Idea Of You.

The Most Dangerous Creation Of Any Society Is The Man Who Has Nothing To Lose.

There Is A Fearful Splendor In Absolute Desolation.

Somebody," Said Jacques, "your Father Or Mine, Should Have Told Us That Not Many People Have Ever Died Of Love. But Multitudes Have Perished, And Are Perishing Every Hour - And In The Oddest Places! - For The Lack Of It.

You Think Your Pain And Your Heartbreak Are Unprecedented In The History Of The World, But Then You Read.

People Who Cling To Their Illusions Find It Difficult, If Not Impossible, To Learn Anything Worth Learning: A People Under The Necessity Of Creating Themselves Must Examine Everything, And Soak Up Learning The Way The Roots Of A Tree Soak Up Water.

A Devotion To Humanity Is... Too Easily Equated With A Devotion To A Cause, And Causes, As We Know, Are Notoriously Bloodthirsty.

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.

It Is Said That The Camera Cannot Lie, But Rarely Do We Allow It To Do Anything Else, Since The Camera Sees What You Point It At: The Camera Sees What You Want It To See.

Sentimentality, The Ostentatious Parading Of Excessive And Spurious Emotion, Is The Mark Of Dishonesty...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 Humanity, The Mark Of Cruelty.

Love Is Like The Lightning, And Your Maturity Is Signaled By The Extent To Which You Can Accept The Dangers And The Power And The Beauty Of Love.

She Was Twenty And Had Come To Realize That, Though She Had A Voice, She Wasn't A Singer; That To Endure And Embrace The Life Of A Singer Demands A Whole Lot More Than A Voice.

All Art Is A Kind Of Confession.

True Rebels After All, Are As Rare As True Lovers,and In Both Cases, To Mistake A Fever For Passion Can Destroy One's Life

You Know, It's Not The World That Was My Oppressor, Because What The World Does To You, If The World Does It To You Long Enough And Effectively Enough, You Begin To Do To Yourself.

Love Takes Off The Masks That We Fear We Cannot Live Without And Know We Cannot Live Within. I Use The Word "love" Here Not Merely In The Personal Sense But As A State Of Being, Or A State Of Grace - Not In The Infantile American Sense Of Being Made Happy But In The Tough And Universal Sense Of Quest And Daring And Growth.

Whoever Is Born In New York Is Ill-equipped To Deal With Any Other City: All Other Cities Seem, At Best, A Mistake, And, At Worst, A Fraud. No Other City Is So Spitefully Incoherent. Whereas Other Cities Flaunt There History - Their Presumed Glory - In Vividly Placed Monuments, Squares, Parks, Plaques, And Boulevards, Such History As New York Has Been Unable Entirely To Obliterate Is To Be Found, Mainly, In The Backwaters Of Wall Street, In The Goat Tracks Of Old And West Broadway, In And Around Washington Square, And, For The Relentless Searcher, In Grimly Inaccessible Regions Of The Bronx.

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.

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.

You Took The Best, So Why Not Take The Rest?

All I Know About Music Is That Not Many People Ever Really Hear It. And Even Then, On The Rare Occasions When Something Opens Within, And The Music Enters, What We Mainly Hear, Or Hear Corroborated, Are Personal, Private, Vanishing Evocations. But The Man Who Creates The Music Is Hearing Something Else, Is Dealing With The Roar Rising From The Void And Imposing Order On It As It Hits The Air. What Is Evoked In Him, Then, Is Of Another Order, More Terrible Because It Has No Words, And Triumphant, Too, For That Same Reason. And His Triumph, When He Triumphs, Is Ours.

People Are Trapped In History And History Is Trapped In Them.

I Don't Know, Now, When I First Looked At Hella And Found Her Stale, Found Her Body Uninteresting, Her Presence Grating. It Seemed To Happen All At Once—i Suppose That Only Means That It Had Been Happening For A Long Time.

The Hope Of The World Lies In What One Demands, Not Of Others, But Of Oneself.

No Man Is A Devil In His Own Mind.

The Price One Pays For Pursuing Any Profession Or Calling Is An Intimate Knowledge Of Its Ugly Side.

I Love America More Than Any Other Country In The World, And, Exactly For This Reason, I Insist On The Right To Criticize Her Perpetually. I Think All Theories Are Suspect, That The Finest Principles May Have To Be Modified, Or May Even Be Pulverized By The Demands Of Life, And That One Must Find, Therefore, One's Own Moral Center And Move Through The World Hoping That This Center Will Guide One Aright.

Each Of Us, Helplessly And Forever, Contains The Other - Male In Female, Female In Male, White In Black, And Black In White. We Are Part Of Each Other. Many Of My Countrymen Appear To Find This Fact Exceedingly Inconvenient And Even Unfair, And So, Very Often, Do I. But None Of Us Can Do Anything About It.

He May Be A Very Nice Man. But I Haven't Got The Time To Figure That Out. All I Know Is, He's Got A Uniform And A Gun And I Have To Relate To Him That Way. That's The Only Way To Relate To Him Because One Of Us May Have To Die.

The Real Victim Of Bigotry Is The White Man Who Hides His Weakness Under His Myth Of Superiority.

The Responsibility Of A Writer Is To Excavate The Experience Of The People Who Produced Him.

You're Getting To Be A Big Boy,' I Said Desperately, 'it's Time You Started Thinking About Your Future.' 'i'm Thinking About My Future,' Said Sonny, Grimly. 'i Think About It All The Time.

We Should Certainly Know By Now That It Is One Thing To Overthrow A Dictator Or Repel An Invader And Quite Another Thing Really To Achieve A Revolution. Time And Time And Time Again, The People Discover That They Have Merely Betrayed Themselves Into The Hands Of Yet Another Pharaoh, Who, Since He Was Necessary To Put The Broken Country Together, Will Not Let Them Go.

I'm Beginning To Think That Maybe Everything That Happens Makes Sense. Like, If It Didn't Make Sense, How Could It Happen?

Whatever White People Do Not Know About Negroes Reveals, Precisely And Inexorably, What They Do Not Know About Themselves.

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.

In The Invincible And Indescribable Squalor Of Harlem ... I Was Tormented. I Felt Caged, Like An Animal. I Wanted To Escape. I Felt If I Did Not Get Out I Would Slowly Strangle.

A Man's Balance Depends On The Weight He Carries Between His Legs.

Any Honest Examination Of The National Life Proves How Far We Are From The Standard Of Human Freedom With Which We Began. The Recovery Of This Standard Demands Of Everyone Who Loves This Country A Hard Look At Himself, For The Greatest Achievements Must Begin Somewhere, And They Always Begin With The Person.

I Am Aware That No Man Is A Villain In His Own Eyes.

Man Cannot Live By Profit Alone.

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 Reason People Think It's Important To Be White Is That They Think It's Important Not To Be Black.

You Think Your Pain And Your Heartbreak Are Unprecedented In The History Of The World, But Then You Read. It Was Dostoevsky And Dickens Who 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 Ever Had Been Alive. Only If We Face These Open Wounds In Ourselves Can We Understand Them In Other People.

The Relatively Conscious Whites And The Relatively Conscious Blacks, Who Must, Like Lovers, Insist On, Or Create, The Consciousness Of The Others In Order To End The Racial Nightmare And Acheive Our Country.

The Interior Life Is A Real Life, And The Intangible Dreams Of People Have A Tangible Effect On The World.

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