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.

Baldwin frames artistic creation as an act of self-disclosure: even when indirect (“oblique”), art inevitably reveals the maker’s inner life. The language of survival suggests that sustained artistic practice demands increasing honesty, because evasion eventually exhausts both the artist and the work. “Tell the whole story” points to a moral and psychological reckoning—facing one’s history, wounds, and complicity—while the visceral “vomit the anguish up” emphasizes that this truth-telling is not refined catharsis but a painful expulsion of what cannot be borne internally. The quote aligns with Baldwin’s broader insistence that confronting reality—personal and social—is the precondition for genuine art.