About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink – it’s my melancholy conviction that I’ve scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it’s impossible to eat enough if you’re worried about the next meal) – and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like Bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. Furthermore, I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. Furthermore, I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. Furthermore, I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

— James Baldwin

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance.

— James Baldwin

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

— James Baldwin

A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.

— James Baldwin

Ain't no such thing as a little fault or a big fault. Satan gets his foot in the door, he ain't going to rest till he's in the room. You are in the Word or you ain'tt--ain't no halfway with God.

— James Baldwin

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

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

All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.

— James Baldwin

...all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me...

— James Baldwin

And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white.

— James Baldwin