“Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have been… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“It is quite impossible to write a worth-while novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily,… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Here was the South Side--a million in captivity--stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived,… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live, and have lived here, are so ugly… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“All cultures have, furthermore, an economic, social, and political base, and no culture can continue to live if its political destiny is not in… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and days had… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty.But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“What kind of friendship have you had? Or for that matter...what kind of love affairs?” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception.” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“He was suggesting that all Negroes were held in a state of supreme tension between the difficult, dangerous relationship in which they stood to… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
