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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.


James Arthur Baldwin

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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy...
JAMES BALDWIN Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy...
JAMES A. BALDWIN The man who is born with a talent which he was meant to use finds his greatest happiness in using it...
JOHANN VON GOETHE He was, I suppose, my best friend, which is a less pathetic way of saying he was my only friend.
RANSOM RIGGS Queerness isn't just Lady Gaga and overpriced drinks and fauxhawks. It's James Baldwin and B...
JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL The romantic idea is that everybody around a writer must suffer for his talent. I think a writer is ...
IRWIN SHAW People say he's an intimidating guy and stuff like that. I suppose he is, but it's his talent that m...
PAUL GIAMATTI What do you mean less than nothing? I don't think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Noth...
E.B. WHITE Few writers have had less journalistic talent than James, and this is his defect, for the supreme ma...
W. H. AUDEN Writing has nothing to do with pretty manners, and less to do with sportsmanship or restraint [...]<...
GEOFFREY WOLFF Conspiracy of the rich;The rich have all conspired to take complete control of their minds & direct ...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) Conspiracy of the rich:The rich have conspired to humbly serve the poor & therefore grab their meage...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) Conspiracy of The Rich;The rich desire riches so they conspire to use the resources of the poor to g...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) There is one in the world who feels for him who is sad a keener pang than he feels for himself; ther...
WASHINGTON IRVING A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and wh...
LEV GROSSMAN No one was born into this world empty; everyone has a talent therein. An activated talent =a fulfill...
MORENIKE AJIBORISHA I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 ye...
LESLIE FIEDLER The draining away of James Baldwin's magic was a drama much discussed in the years leading up to...
DARRYL PINCKNEY Any child born into the hugely consumptionist way of life so common in the industrial world will hav...
ALBERT GORE For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right wor...
CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
CATHERINE BOWEN Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less...
A. W. TOZER Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken or out of place, different somehow, royalt...
CASSANDRA CLARE I started to read James Baldwin very early on in my life. At a time, as a young adult in the Sixties...
RAOUL PECK After each of his books, the writer, for a while, feels once again that he can now die happy.
CRISS JAMI Feast of James the Apostle When Jesus calls his disciples "brothers" and "friends", he is contrad...
DAVID KIRK He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimo...
RAFAEL SABATINI To work in the world lovingly means that we are defining what we will be for, rather than reacting t...
CHRISTINA BALDWIN Nothing is born into this world without labor.
ROB LIANO But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt...
OLIVER STONE I was not born into the world of the stuntman and the daredevil; I was born into the world of theate...
PHILIPPE PETIT The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fa...
ROALD DAHL It wounds a man less to confess that he has failed in any pursuit through idleness, neglect, the lov...
LORD MELBOURNE It wounds a man less to confess that he has failed in any pursuit through idleness, neglect, the lov...
WILLIAM LAMB MELBOURNE Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
HAMILTON WRIGHT MABI Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE I think Mugabe only feels secure when he is pursuing his opponents, and his strategy is not to give ...
ELDRED MASUNUNGURE We are all born into the world with nothing. Everything we acquire after that is profit.
SAM EWING Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He ...
GORE VIDAL I don't know if I have a favorite color.
KATE MIDDLETON It's very special having a new little girl.
KATE MIDDLETON I think what helps me when I'm working on a play, any play, is the degree to which the writer ha...
JEFFREY DEMUNN Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a singl...
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a singl...
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL It feels like the firings were completely based on propositions of conspiracy, which are non-existen...
ANDREW RECORD When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time h...
ANAïS NIN There was a man who was an associate of jimmy Hoffa, who testified against Hoffa in his trial down i...
LOUIS STOKES Every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last
CHARLES DICKENS Someday you will read in the papers that Moody is dead. Don't you believe a word of it. At that mome...
DWIGHT L. MOODY The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or wh...
C. WRIGHT MILLS That's my opinion, that his death was preventable. Absolutely. Because he had a pathology which is t...
LEO BOKERIA Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he pretty much stays within his own life. He's so good - I...
TOM WOLFE I suppose that every wanderer started in a garden somewhere. So few of us are born into motion.
CANDAS JANE DORSEY All my life I've felt like there was something wrong with me. Something missing or damaged."
"E...
CASSANDRA CLARE Where a beast would have claws, I was born with talent.
KLAUS KINSKI He was going to be armed with his wand - which, just now, felt like nothing more than a narrow strip...
J.K. ROWLING The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is le...
GARRETT HARDIN The generation into which I was born was tedious.
OSCAR WILDE Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, Ja...
COLM TOIBIN We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we shall carry nothing out. When that com...
JOHN MEADE FALKNER Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke i...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and...
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has ama...
JUNOT DíAZ Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than...
CALVIN COOLIDGE We are racing down Main Street. Arthur is right on the tail of a blck sedan with tinted windows that...
PETER CANNING The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under...
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN It's all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you're properly trained.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Like all best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II My husband has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years, and I owe him a debt greater ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have to be seen to be believed.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughou...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss, ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I myself prefer my New Zealand eggs for breakfast.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but t...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II To what greater inspiration and counsel can we turn than to the imperishable truth to be found in th...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something e...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts an...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Grief is the price we pay for love.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a nobl...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Chr...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses w...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your s...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Therefore I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not the symbol of a power and a splendor that are g...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the man...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Madam President, speaking here in Dublin Castle it is impossible to ignore the weight of history, as...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II These wretched babies don't come until they are ready.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The events that I have attended to mark my Diamond Jubilee have been a humbling experience. It has t...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and o...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The sword was called Kaledvoulc'h, which means hard lightning, though Igraine prefers to call it Exc...
BERNARD CORNWELL

More James Arthur Baldwin

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JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on ...
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JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to wher...
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JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our b...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have in tryi...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to cont...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN There is a ''sanctity'' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing on...
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JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immu...
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JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something h...
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JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than tha...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
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JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening th...
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JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast...
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JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN He who wears a mask cannot see within himself.
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JAMES BALDWIN You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more...
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 ...
JAMES BALDWIN Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and th...
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JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself...
JAMES BALDWIN The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea...
JAMES BALDWIN The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the poin...
JAMES BALDWIN If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described...
JAMES BALDWIN Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that ...
JAMES BALDWIN People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast...
JAMES BALDWIN When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I ...
JAMES BALDWIN I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the m...
JAMES BALDWIN It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
JAMES BALDWIN But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without mo...
JAMES BALDWIN Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people ...
JAMES BALDWIN I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on ...
JAMES BALDWIN We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we ...
JAMES BALDWIN We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man...
JAMES BALDWIN Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in...
JAMES BALDWIN The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to e...
JAMES BALDWIN It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the inde...
JAMES BALDWIN A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES BALDWIN People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on...
JAMES BALDWIN The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other his...
JAMES BALDWIN An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wre...
JAMES BALDWIN An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience...
JAMES BALDWIN You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world...
JAMES BALDWIN The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the pa...
JAMES BALDWIN Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours.
JAMES BALDWIN For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting...
JAMES BALDWIN The future is... black.
JAMES BALDWIN Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom...
JAMES BALDWIN Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. Peop...
JAMES BALDWIN James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no on...
JAMES BALDWIN If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze...
JAMES BALDWIN There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own e...
JAMES BALDWIN Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.
JAMES BALDWIN Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.
JAMES BALDWIN Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is...
JAMES BALDWIN When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
JAMES BALDWIN No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, ...
JAMES BALDWIN No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, fo...
JAMES BALDWIN Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion...
JAMES BALDWIN There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one ou...
JAMES BALDWIN Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themsel...
JAMES BALDWIN Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a s...
JAMES BALDWIN Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES BALDWIN People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly si...
JAMES BALDWIN The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibilit...
JAMES BALDWIN We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied ...
JAMES BALDWIN The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
JAMES BALDWIN Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and stre...
JAMES BALDWIN Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocu...
JAMES BALDWIN Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
JAMES BALDWIN He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a ...
JAMES BALDWIN The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
JAMES BALDWIN Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immut...
JAMES BALDWIN The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their abili...
JAMES BALDWIN I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on th...
JAMES BALDWIN Anyone who had ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN Whose little boy are you?
JAMES BALDWIN There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for the...
JAMES BALDWIN There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are...
JAMES BALDWIN To accept one's past -- one's history -- is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how...
JAMES BALDWIN Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's...
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are descr...
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be reall...
JAMES BALDWIN It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the arti...
JAMES BALDWIN Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also peopl...
JAMES BALDWIN A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.
JAMES BALDWIN We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; a...
JAMES BALDWIN The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
JAMES BALDWIN We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink.
JAMES BALDWIN Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.
JAMES BALDWIN The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where...
JAMES BALDWIN I imagine one of the reasons people cling to thier hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
JAMES BALDWIN All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the In...
JAMES BALDWIN Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense...
JAMES BALDWIN Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossib...
JAMES BALDWIN The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the dis...
JAMES BALDWIN The first time I saw Reverend Shuttlesworth, for example, he came strolling across the parking lot o...
JAMES BALDWIN To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior ar...
JAMES BALDWIN The distance between us, and I had never thought of this before, was that they did not know this, an...
JAMES BALDWIN Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two unde...
JAMES BALDWIN People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to p...
JAMES BALDWIN I remembered his older brother, who had died in Sicily, in battle for the free world- he had barely ...
JAMES BALDWIN Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is ...
JAMES BALDWIN All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that th...
JAMES BALDWIN It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an "integrationist" - this was...
JAMES BALDWIN The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves ...
JAMES BALDWIN I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fi...
JAMES BALDWIN I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.
JAMES BALDWIN People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their...
JAMES BALDWIN Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever di...
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current a...
JAMES BALDWIN