James Baldwin Quotes

“Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn’t want to admit. The discovery of one’s sexual preference doesn’t have to be a trauma. It’s a trauma because it’s such a traumatized society.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“GOLDSTEIN: I suspect most gay people have fantasies about genocide.

BALDWIN: Well, it's not a fantasy exactly since the society makes its will toward you very, very clear. Especially the police, for example, or truck drivers. I know from my own experience that the macho men - truck drivers, cops, football players - these people are far more complex than they want to realize. That's why I call them infantile. They have needs which, for them, are literally inexpressible. They don't dare look into the mirror. And that is why they need faggots. They've created faggots in order to act out a sexual fantasy on the body of another man and not take any responsibility for it. Do you see what I mean? I think it's very important for the male homosexual to recognize that he is a sexual target for other men, and that is why he is despised, and why he is called a faggot. He is called a faggot because other males need him.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“I said before that America’s effort to avoid the presence of black people constricts American literature. It creates a trap white writers find themselves in.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“Where I was in the world. I mean, what I’m made of. Anyway, Giovanni’s Room is not really about homosexuality. It’s the vehicle through which the book moves. Go Tell It on the Mountain, for example, is not about a church, and Giovanni is not really about homosexuality. It’s about what happens to you if you’re afraid to love anybody. Which is much more interesting than the question of homosexuality.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“GOLDSTEIN: I don't think straight people realize how frightening it is to finally admit to yourself that this is going to be you forever.

BALDWIN: It's very frightening. But the so-called straight person is no safer than I am really. Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn't want to admit. The discovery of one's sexual preference doesn't have to be a trauma. It's a trauma because it's such a traumatized society.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“BALDWIN: There’s no such thing as safety on this planet. No one knows that much. No one ever will. Not only about the world but about himself. That’s why it’s unsafe. This is what the whole sense of tragedy is really about. People think that a sense of tragedy is a kind of … embroidery, something irrelevant, that you can take or leave. But, in fact, it is a necessity. That’s what the Blues and Spirituals are all about. It is the ability to look on things as they are and survive your losses, or even not survive them—to know that your losses are coming. To know they are coming is the only possible insurance you have, a faint insurance, that you will survive them.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“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.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“TROUPE: Do you have any feelings about yuppies?

BALDWIN: I saw them coming. I knew them. They can't, I'm afraid, be taught anything.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“Anyway, "Giovanni's Room" is not really about homosexuality. It's the vehicle through which the book moves. "Go Tell It on the Mountain", for example, is not about a church, and "Giovanni" is not really about homosexuality. It's about what happens to you if you're afraid to love anybody. Which is much more interesting than the question of homosexuality.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology, as you put it, because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“You see, whites want black writers to mostly deliver something as if it were an official version of the black experience. But the vocabulary won’t hold it, simply. No true account, really, of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. As it is, the only way that you can deal with it is by doing great violence to the assumptions on which the vocabulary is based.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“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.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“That’s what the Blues and Spirituals are all about. It is the ability to look on things as they are and survive your losses, or even not survive them—to know that your losses are coming. To know they are coming is the only possible insurance you have, a faint insurance, that you will survive them.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“the little girl who walked into the Little Rock School House and was spat on was much freer than the white child who sat there with a misconceived notion.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“Look, men have been sleeping with men for thousands of years—and raising tribes. This is a Western sickness, it really is. It’s an artificial division. Men will be sleeping with each other when the trumpet sounds. It’s only this infantile culture which has made such a big deal of it.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“It is one thing to demand justice in literature, and another thing to face the price that one has got to pay for it in life.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“One has got to live together here or else there won’t be any country.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations

“Every Negro in America is in one way or another menaced by it. One is bom in a white country, a white Protestant Puritan country, where one was once a slave, where all standards and all the images ... when you open your eyes on the world, everything you see: none of it applies to you.
You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“TERKEL: You have to decide who you are-whether you are black or white-who you are ...
BALDWIN: Yes, who you are. Then the pressure of being black or white is robbed of its power. You can, of course, still be bearen up on the South Side by anybody; I mean, the social menace does not lessen. The world perhaps can destroy you physically. The danger of your destroying yourself does not vanish, but it is minimized.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations