(1955–)
U.S. memoirist, poet, and professor
James Baldwin
Perhaps the turning point in one’s life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. II (New York: Picador, 2007), 259.
I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, Look. I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, Look again, which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.
“James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78,” Issue 91, The Paris Review, 1984.
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.
“Sonny’s Blues,” in American Short Story Masterpieces, edited and with an introduction by Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks (New York: Dell, 1987), 29–30.
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. II (New York: Picador, 2007), 266.