The responsibility of the writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
~James A. Baldwin
From A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni (1973).
You can see more excerpts from their conversation in this post, and you can see other quotes from Baldwin here and here.
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There are so many great Baldwin quotes in your last link. I hadn’t seen some of them before. What an amazing and wise man.
I get really inspired by that 1973 interview with Baldwin and Giovanni because it’s a dialogue between writers who are different generations. You can see through their interactions how the torch is passed from writer to writer, generation to generation.
Below are a few of my favorite James Baldwin quotes from the many listed at your links. The last one distills it all down to the bare essence. A simple, elegant truth. I’m going into my day inspired to write.
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I was especially struck by that last one when I saw it. I thought, hmm, I want to be a good man and an honest writer. Was that perhaps the juxtaposition of what he actually wrote? We do talk talk about honesty in writing. Maybe there was a message there.
Did you wonder about that at all, QM?
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Yes, from what I have read, Baldwin was an incredibly honest writer. If you listen to his interviews (I think I provided links to some of those in Baldwin & Giovanni: On Truth & Love), he is so forthcoming in them. He took a lot of risks.
Of course, he also exiled himself in France for long periods of time. I think it gave him a different perspective. Eventually, he came back home.
I wonder if we all end up going back home? I guess that’s part of the excavating. And home is never the place we remember – it’s changed. And so have we.
What do you think?
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I was thinking maybe he was saying in a subtle way that it’s more important to be honest in living than in writing. Not that you should be less than honest in writing, but maybe there are things you don’t tell (because they can damage others, perhaps?). I don’t know. That’s just what I thought when I read that quote.
I do think we end up going home, although not always physically. Easy for me to say; I never left home ;). Well, almost never. I guess there’s still time…
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Ah, I see how you took the quote; the emphasis was on different words. That fits in with what Carolyn was saying in her comments on the Austin piece. Makes sense.
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