“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.”

— James Baldwin

"The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman" in Esquire (April 1960); republished as "The Northern Protestant" in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961) and in The Price of the Ticket (1985)

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James Baldwin 163

(1924-1987) writer from the United States 1924–1987

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“Art has to be a kind of confession.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

"An interview with James Baldwin" (1961); an interview with Studs Terkel published in Conversations With James Baldwin (1989)
Context: 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.