James A. Baldwin
James A. Baldwin
James A. "Jim" Baldwinwas an American football player, track athlete, coach of football, basketball, and baseball, and college athletics administrator. He served as the head football coach at Rhode Island State College—now the University of Rhode Island, the University of Maine, Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina—now Duke University, Lehigh University, and Wake Forest University, compiling a career college football record of 41–32–14. Baldwin was also the head basketball coach at the same five schools, amassing a career college basketball...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth2 August 1924
CountryUnited States of America
Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important.
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.
Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
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.
To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
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.
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.