James Baldwin

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

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.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

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 primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being 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.

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.

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

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.