Most of Baldwin’s work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved.

Sayings by James Baldwin:

1. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

2. Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

3. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

4. Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

5. Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.

6. Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

7. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

8. I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

9. I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

10. I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

11. I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

12. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

13. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

14. If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

15. Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.

16. No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

17 People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.