James Baldwin

[The Negro past] of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible.

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.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

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

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way . . . people look at reality, then you can change it.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. . . .

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.