"When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know. What you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway."
James Baldwin

"The song does not belong to the singer. The singer is found by the song...It was a wonder, a marvel- a mystery. It caused me to see, in any case, that we are all limited, and, mostly, misshapen instruments, and yet, if we can, simultaneously, confront and surrender, extraordinary fingers can string from us the response to our mortality."
from Just Above My Head by James Baldwin

"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does....Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become....this inability to renew themselves at the fountains of their own lives....The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality- for this can only be oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes."
from The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

"The clarity of the answer diminishes as the intensity of the question rises; as the question fragments itself into many sharp edges."
from Just Above My Head by James Baldwin