James Baldwin Quotes

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

Reality isn't what it used to be.

People can care about changing the world. But what gets them to act is pressure and social reward.

Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. The proof of that is the ability of a dictator to snuff out the life of a writer.

There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.

'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere 'lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation oа reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.

It is a task of art to express clear vision of reality.

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

The most difficult matter is not so much to change the world as yourself.

...dreams were dreams and reality was reality and she felt people were better off understanding the difference.

It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.

We're changing ourselves to fit the world instead of changing the world to fit women.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?

In earlier times artists liked to show what was actually visible... nowadays we are concerned with reality, rather than the merely visible.

I have been saying and writing for so many years that one sentence can encapsulate the totality of life, of existence, of being: Infinite love is the only truth-everything else is Illusion.

Concepts of well-being for countries, for peoples and for individuals are changing. In such a world, to argue for rules that never change would be to deny the reality found in scientific knowledge and reasoned judgment.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.

Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.

You choose your own reality and you - social media then amplifies those conspiracy theories. So that's why I say social media is itself a revolutionary phenomenon.

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.