James Baldwin Quotes

The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke; it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.

Most of the time - in 'Pan's Labyrinth' or 'Devil's Backbone' - I'm talking about my childhood.

I've been writing stories all my life. My very first story had two little black girls riding horses. They were both me, too, so that's how into me I was.

For the most part, this record is autobiographical. At some point, the story of 'The Houston Kid' takes my experiences from 6 to 15 years old, and it sort of cross-pollinates with other kids in my neighborhood. It fuses their experiences with what was going on in my life.

I've never had any interest in retelling stories from my youth.

I'm just singing about my own life. Singing about all the little stories in my life and the things I've been through.

Personal inspection at zero altitude. The stories come from my life - if not my own experiences, then about topics and subjects that interest me.

Help shape the stories that people are telling about you.

The past is just a story we tell ourselves.

Mine (story) ain't the scariest, the clearest, the most painful, or the most beautiful. It just happens to be the one that's got it's fingers around my throat.

Every time I change the way I explain myself to myself, I have to rearrange the story of my life.

I have no problem at all taking my shirt off to tell a story.

I have always loved reading. Ever since I was a young girl I had a book by my bed and would get lost in the world of make believe.

Some stories wait their turn to be told, others just tap you on the shoulder and insist you tell them.

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.

As I don't consider myself exceptional, but simply a storyteller, each of my stories is really a period of my life. Deep down I feel that criticism of my work-which is the most sincere and authentic vision of myself-is unsuitable and immodest, whether it is favorable or unfavorable.

Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone.

As a child my grandmother used to tell us stories about the dead and the mystical.

I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

You're the hero of your own story. So it's interesting for historical revisionism to happen. I had let go of my own story from my own childhood and whatever anger I had and I began to see it from a very different place. It's really easy to be like "This thing happened to me! Look what they did to me or are doing to me." These are such powerful ideas and it's so easy to hold onto them forever.

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

The word 'confession,' to me, means needing to be absolved. I'm not asking for forgiveness. I'm not asking people to understand. I'd like to think that I tell stories and sometimes my life weaves through it.

So I decided to make a film about our need to tell stories, to own our stories, to understand them, and to have them heard.

I long To hear the story of your life, which must Take the ear strangely.

All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.