James Arthur Baldwin

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line banishment from all the living and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation one has begun to stop living.

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.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice that they're better than other human beings.

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.

I am what time circumstance history have made of me certainly but I am also much more than that. So are we all.

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.

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

Fires can't be made with dead embers nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

Every legend moreover contains its residuum of truth and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world, but it is impossible to foresee this it is impossible to be warned.

The only thing that white people have that black people need or should want is power-and no one holds power forever.

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them.