« All Writing Quotes · James A. Baldwin's Page
Writing Quotes by James A. Baldwin
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Writing is a political instrument.
- You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world...…
- One writes out of one thing only-one's own experience,
- You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
- 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…
- There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and…
- 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…
- When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.
- You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can…
- If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer…
- 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,…
More Writing Quotes
- Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt
- Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing. — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then… — Paul Auster
- When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush… — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
- A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. — Richard Bach
- In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing… — Billie Joe Armstrong
- I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know. — Andrea Arnold