Skip to content

Quotes from Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin

1924–1987 United States

← All quotes by James Baldwin

9 quotes

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

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

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.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

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.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I do not expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: James Baldwin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.