Baldwin Art Quotes

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.

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.

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.

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

All art is a kind of confession.

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

My job as a writer is simple. Write a book I’m proud of, and present it as a gift to the world. Some will love it. Some will hate it. That’s the nature of art.

I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois’s learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels.

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. This has happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that they are alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. They have to disturb the peace. Otherwise, chaos.

This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

I look over at my hero shelf and see Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Shunryu Suzuki, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Subcomandante Marcos, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin. These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender. (“80 Books No Woman Should Read”)

But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.

An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are. I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.

The rights and liberties represented by democracy, many agreed, were losing ground across the globe to restrictions imposed by authoritarian autocracy… It appeared ignorance had indeed managed to secure an alliance with power (to paraphrase James Baldwin’s famous quote) to become the most ferocious enemy of justice on the contemporary historical landscape.

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. All of it, the literal and the fanciful.

I think of a line that has always stayed with me, from Marwa Helal's "poem for brad who wants me to write about the pyramids." "This is where the poets will interject. They will say show- dont tell. But that assumes most people can see." It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit- exclaim, even- that no description of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it. At the very least, one should not be able to have it both ways. One should not, with a modicum of self-respect, quote Morrison and Baldwin at every turn, but then, faced with the sort of injustice with which so much of their work contends, suddenly retreat into descriptions of whatever it is the finches are doing. What is this work we do? What are we good for? The literary critic Northup Frye once said, "all art is metaphor. And the metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity. Our derangement. The plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul. One's capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot, in any rational way, be understood. Only felt. Only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque- what we do to one another so grotesque- that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.

Jimmy said, "We survived slavery. Think about that. Not because we were strong. The American Indians were strong, and they were on their own land. But they have not survived genocide. You know how we survived?" I said nothing. "We put surviving into our poems and into our songs. We put it into our folk tales. We danced surviving in Congo Square in New Orleans and put it in our pots when we cooked pinto beans. We wore surviving on our backs when we clothed ourselves in the colors of the rainbow. We were pulled down so low we could hardly lift our eyes, so we knew, if we wanted to survive, we had better lift our own spirits. So we laughed whenever we got the chance.

I was going be to flying around like some wacked-out Chinese martial arts movie hero by endgame, which was 200% okay with me.

Lo, thou, my Love, art fair; Myself have made thee so; Yea, thou art fair indeed, Wherefore thou shalt not need In beauty to despair; For I accept thee so, For fair. [excerpt from "Christ to His Spouse"]

The purpose of art,” James Baldwin wrote, “is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.” He might have been channeling Dostoyevsky’s statement that “we have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know.

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.

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. The

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.

All artists, if they are to survive, are forced at last, to vomit the anguish up

[Art is] very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

Swifter far than summer's flight, Swifter far than youth's delight, Swifter far than happy night, Art thou come and gone: As the earth when leaves are dead, As the night when sleep is sped, As the heart when joy is fled, I am left alone, alone.

The artistic objects by which they are surrounded cannot possibly fulfill their original function of disturbing the peace—which is still the only method by which the mind can be improved—they bear witness instead to the attainment of a certain level of economic stability and a certain thin measure of sophistication. But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.

One writes out of one thing only — one’s own experience. Everything depends on the 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. - Autobiographical Notes

He told us that the difference between the function of the arts in Europe and their function in Africa lay in the fact that, in Africa, the function of the arts is more present and pervasive, is infinitely less special, “is done by all, for all.” Thus, art for art’s sake is not a concept which makes any sense in Africa. The division between art and life out of which such a concept comes does not exist there. Art itself is taken to be perishable, to be made again each time it disappears or is destroyed. What is clung to is the spirit which makes art possible. And the African idea of this spirit is very different from the European idea. European art attempts to imitate nature. African art is concerned with reaching beyond and beneath nature, to contact, and itself become a part of la force vitale. The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

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, too, the terms with which they are connected to other people. This has happened to every one of us, I'm sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened one hundred years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life *is* important. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

Quite unpredictable things happen when the bulk of the population attains what we think of as a high cultural level... This, I think, is because the effort of a Schoenberg or a Picasso…or a William Faulkner or an Albert Camus…has nothing to do, at bottom, with physical comfort, or indeed with comfort of any other kind. But the aim of the people who rise to this high cultural level...is precisely comfort for the body and the mind. The artistic objects by which they are surrounded cannot possibly fulfill their original function of disturbing the peace...which is still the only method by which the mind can be improved...they bear witness instead to the attainment of a certain level of economic stability and a certain thin measure of sophistication. But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.

I think that much of this criticism fails to take seriously the continuity of themes running through Baldwin’s body of work: that he continued to examine questions of American identity and history, railed against the traps of categories that narrowed our frames of reference, insisted that we reject the comfort and illusion of safety that the country’s myths offered, and struggled mightily with the delicate balance between his advocacy and his art.

If a sport could ever be art, baseball would be it.

The first time I picked up James Baldwin, I finally saw myself. It occurred to me that I could be an activist from my own source of power—words. It can only make our journey toward justice more robust, more beautiful, when we offer a diversity of paths, a more expansive vision of action. This is not new. This is Detour and Hiero Veiga's graffiti art resurrecting Black faces slain by the police. This is Tricia Hersey and The Nap Ministry creating collective sleeping experiences to reclaim the justice and liberation in rest. This is even, to some degree, some of the words you'll find in this book. Written in holy defiance of what is, and in imagination of what should be. If writing is a calling, I have a responsibility to demand justice in my writing as much as in the streets. When we expand our imaginations for activism, we enter into practices of lament and rage with more particularity, and we begin to realize more nuanced paths to justice.

We need literature to remind us how like each other we are, despite our differences. Baldwin spoke beautifully about this: You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. In reality, in this very pragmatic sense, we all have limitations. There are borders within all of us, things that make us unalike. We come from separate nations. But when you read literature, you enter a republic of imagination that transcends time and space. So you are an African-American boy living in New York City, and you discovered that the person who best expresses you is a man who lived in Russia and has been dead a hundred years. That gives you a sense of hope, a sense of connection and camaraderie. It is one of those moments when you’re glad you’re human. This is why so many people will say that one book changed their whole life. Or writers talk about how reading a book made them want to become a writer.

My job as a writer is simple. Write a book I’m proud of, and present it as a gift to the world. Some will love it. Some will hate it. That’s the nature of art.

The purpose of art,” James Baldwin wrote, “is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.” He might have been channeling Dostoyevsky's statement that “we have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know.

He is not only motivated to transform the stuff of experience into the beauty of art; as a poet he also bears witness to what he sees and what we have forgotten, calling our attention to the enduring legacies of slavery in our lives; to the impact of systemic discrimination throughout the country that has denied generations of black people access to the so-called American dream; to the willful blindness of so many white Americans to the violence that sustains it all. He laments the suffering that results from our evasions and refusals and passes judgment on what we have done and not done in order to release ourselves into the possibility of becoming different and better people. He bears witness for those who cannot because they did not survive, and he bears witness for those who survived it all, wounded and broken.

After I had my drink with them and said good night to James Baldwin and was kissed by Simone Signoret on both cheeks, I went outside, walked close to my car, and threw up on the street. It wasn’t about the food. I may act brave and sometimes outrageous—on screen—but in real life I get terribly nervous when I meet the great talents whom I’ve admired for years from afar.

Lo, thou, my Love, art fair; Myself have made thee so; Yea, thou art fair indeed, Wherefore thou shalt not need In beauty to despair; For I accept thee so, For fair.

Higher magic is techne, Baldwin. A wonderfully nuanced Greek word, as you must know,” Gwyneth replied. “It means art as well as craft, and skill as well as technique.

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