The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying e… - James Baldwin

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

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.

I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.