James A. Baldwin Art Quotations

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

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.

Great art can only be created out of love.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

All art is a kind of confession.

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