"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"
About this Quote
Baldwin lands a knife of a sentence because he makes “greed” sound less like money and more like appetite - erotic, social, existential. A writer, in his telling, is a kind of sanctioned predator: he wants everything, “practically everybody,” not only as company but as material. The sly add-on, “in another sense,” hints at desire without spelling it out, letting the reader feel the heat while Baldwin keeps control of the room. It’s both confession and indictment.
The engine here is the paradox: the writer’s hunger is boundless, yet the writer “needs no one at all.” That’s not a compliment. Baldwin is pointing at the moral asymmetry in the artistic transaction. Writers take people into themselves - their voices, flaws, tragedies, private moments - and convert them into sentences that will outlive the relationship. The work can be made in solitude; the raw material can’t. So the writer’s intimacy risks becoming extractive, a way of consuming others while preserving the self’s independence.
Context matters: Baldwin wrote out of a life lived under relentless scrutiny - Black, queer, expatriate, and permanently drafted into representing something larger than himself. He knew how identity gets appropriated and narrated by institutions. This line flips the lens back onto the artist: even the supposedly sensitive observer can practice a kind of colonizing. Its sting is disciplinary. Baldwin isn’t romanticizing the lone genius; he’s warning that artistry can be a refined form of taking, and that the writer’s “needlessness” is exactly what makes the appetite so appalling.
The engine here is the paradox: the writer’s hunger is boundless, yet the writer “needs no one at all.” That’s not a compliment. Baldwin is pointing at the moral asymmetry in the artistic transaction. Writers take people into themselves - their voices, flaws, tragedies, private moments - and convert them into sentences that will outlive the relationship. The work can be made in solitude; the raw material can’t. So the writer’s intimacy risks becoming extractive, a way of consuming others while preserving the self’s independence.
Context matters: Baldwin wrote out of a life lived under relentless scrutiny - Black, queer, expatriate, and permanently drafted into representing something larger than himself. He knew how identity gets appropriated and narrated by institutions. This line flips the lens back onto the artist: even the supposedly sensitive observer can practice a kind of colonizing. Its sting is disciplinary. Baldwin isn’t romanticizing the lone genius; he’s warning that artistry can be a refined form of taking, and that the writer’s “needlessness” is exactly what makes the appetite so appalling.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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