James Baldwin Quotes

Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. … Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these.

Nobody makes me do anything I don't want to do. It's my decision. So the biggest devil is me. I'm either my best friend or my worst enemy. And that's how I have to deal with it.

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin' a road other men have gone down
I'm seein' your world of people and things
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings

It is a lovely night, and they are much to be pitied who have not been taught to feel, in some degree, as you do; who have not, at least, been given a taste for Nature in early life. They lose a great deal.

Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.

It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority. Especially one-sided persons are troublesome. Few are accomplished in many arts and most cling narrowly to their own opinion.

My God, what am I doing here? It's weird. How do you get to the Met? Money! Lots and lots of money! I can imagine Pavarotti next door at the improv going, "Two Jews walk into a bar...

Li Yi-an was the greatest poetess of China. Once her husband asked one of his friends to pick out the best lines that he liked from a number of his poems, having, however, concealed in them some pieces by his wife. The friend picked out, to his dismay, only lines from her pen.

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.

It's you who invokes the rain in the town. But the rain doesn't soak my soul. My soul's for you... ...and deep down there... ...celebrations all around! When I behold you... ...it seems your body's made up of the soft rose petals! Your lips... ...are they the same artist as they had once been?

I underlined my conviction that running a business and managing an enterprise were not merely a private concern but a public endeavor.

Shakib Bhai to me is the most handsome Bengali hero after Uttam Kumar. Once I told Shakib Bhai in a hospital that his natural look is his best look. You can fight Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Uttam Kumar with this look.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Wish I had concentrated; they said love was complicated.
But it was something I just fell into.
And it was overrated, but just look what I created!

Sense of justice is one of the most wonderful ideals of Islam, because as I read in the Quran I find those dynamic principles of life, not mystic but practical ethics for the daily conduct of life suited to the whole world.