J.F. Baldwin Quotes

Not a lot of individuals get to refer to the Lord in their prayers as 'Dude', but he's doing a new thing with me.

When I told my parents, 'I'm going to be an actor,' they screamed and wept and freaked out.

When I was a little boy in Worcestershire reading history books I never thought I should have to interfere between a king and his mistress.

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

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

I would never do another sitcom. It was so boring I wanted to pull my fingernails off.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas.

One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you.

You will find in politics that you are much exposed to the attribution of false motive. Never complain and never explain.

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.

My heroes are the camera crew and the electricians. They work such long hours.

To work in the world lovingly means that we are defining what we will be for, rather than reacting to what we are against.

In the midst of overwhelming noise and distraction, the voice of story is calling us to remember our true selves.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.

Everything that Bush touches turns to manure in public policy.

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.

The patriots of 1776 had far more to fear from Benedict Arnold than they did King George. An enemy easily identified is much less formidable than one who marches in the uniform of an ally.

A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.

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.

Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

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

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something — I am God.

If Barack Obama is elected, I'll be moving out of the country.

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

It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

Fear is a killer, when it comes to the creative process.

My life is God's life in me for Him to do with what He wants.

I've been to MTV and all of that worldly stuff. It's death. It's meaningless.

Apparently I'm in rehab for intensive partying soooo I'm just going to lay pretty low for a bit and maybe get some frozen yogurt.

In 2002, in this country, there was an observation that for the first time in America, more kids were actively pursuing skateboarding than baseball.

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Success begets success. I've been offered a lot of movies now that '30 Rock' has been successful.

... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

Like all science, psychology is knowledge; and like science again, it is knowledge of a definite thing, the mind.

I've been sober now for a couple of years and I'm taking my sobriety very seriously - one day at a time and I am moving forward in my career.

You took the best, so why not take the rest?

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

You write in order to change the world.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.