People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.

This line is not James Baldwin’s; it belongs to the Booker Prize-winning Nigerian-British writer Ben Okri, who wrote it in his 1997 essay collection A Way of Being Free, in the essay “The Joys of Storytelling.” Okri’s own words read: “A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick” — a meditation on how the narratives a nation tells shape its collective health, a sentiment esteemed enough to be inscribed on the Memorial Gates at Constitution Hill in London. The version credited to Baldwin drops the opening “A,” turning Okri’s point about peoples and nations into a tidier line about the individual, which is how it drifted into wellness and motivational circles. We found no Baldwin book, essay, interview, or letter containing it, and the earliest firm attributions — in Okri’s own text and in scholarship quoting it directly — all point to him. The Baldwin label appears to be a modern misattribution born of thematic resemblance, and we have corrected the record accordingly.