James A. Baldwin Quotes about Art

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Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you

Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.

James A. Baldwin

Art, Mean, People

Interview with Studs Terkel (1961), as quoted in "Conversations With James Baldwin" edited by Fred R. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, May 1, 1989.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

James A. Baldwin

Sweet, Art, Real

"Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1955.

The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

James A. Baldwin

Art, Real, Order

Great art can only be created out of love.

James A. Baldwin

Art, Artist, Great Art

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 A. Baldwin

Art, Kindness, Survival

"Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1961.

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.

James A. Baldwin

Art, Creativity, Being Alone

"The Creative Process" by James A. Baldwin originally published in The National Culture Center's "Creative America", 1962, and later published in James A. Baldwin "The Price of the Ticket", 1985.