James A. Baldwin Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• 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.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Kindness, Survival

  "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1961.

• One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

  James A. Baldwin

  Sweet, Art, Real

  "Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1955.

• Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Mean, People

  Interview with Studs Terkel (1961), as quoted in "Conversations With James Baldwin" edited by Fred R. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, May 1, 1989.

• Great art can only be created out of love.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Artist, Great Art

• The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Creativity, Being Alone

  "The Creative Process" by James A. Baldwin originally published in The National Culture Center's "Creative America", 1962, and later published in James A. Baldwin "The Price of the Ticket", 1985.

• Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important.

  James A. Baldwin

  Life, Art, Important

• It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Important, Looks

  "Autobiographical Notes" by James A. Baldwin (1952), republished in James A. Baldwin "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), archive.nytimes.com.

• The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Answers, Purpose

• The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Real, Order

• All art is a kind of confession.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Kind, Confession

  "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1961.

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