James Baldwin - The Last Interview And Other Conversations

Your troubles are always coming. And Cadillacs don't get you through. And neither do psychiatrists, incidentally. All that gets you through it, really, is some faith in life, which is not so easy to achieve.

Freedom is a very dangerous thing. Anything else is disastrous. But freedom is dangerous. You've got to make choices. You've got to make very dangerous choices. You've got to be taught that your life is in your hands.

It is almost impossible to assess what was lost, which makes it impossible to assess what is gained.

It is one thing to demand justice in literature, and another thing to face the price that one has got to pay for it in life.

You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.

What struck me was the fact that she was singing, as you say, about a disaster, which had almost killed her, and she accepted it and was going beyond it. The fantastic understatement in it. It is the way I want to write, you know.