Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that moment would have locked me forever in … - James Baldwin

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent — which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next — one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

To tell you the truth, the results of the civil rights movement to me has nothing to do with civil rights. (I'm talking with hindsight. I might not have said this two years ago.) The one thing it revealed to me was a profound nobility, a real nobility on the part of a whole lot of black people, old and young. There is no other word for it. It was a passionate example. It was doomed to political failure, but that doesn't make any difference. The example will never, never die. And on another level, it exposed white people. Some of them understood it and some of them didn't. Some of them really understood what it meant to have all those kids cattleprodded and hosed and beaten and murdered and chained and castrated. The moral image of a cattleprod against a woman's breast or against a man's testicles. It exposed some things for some people and on the other hand most of the people hid. They did not want to see it and don't see it until today. That's how we have Nixon in the White House and we see this hood Agnew on his way to jail. And then, once again, to keep the nigger in his place, they called it law and order. They brought into office law and order, but I call it the Fourth Reich. I must say, I claim for the black people of America the example of nobility which I have never seen before and no one in this century has seen before. Malcolm was noble. Martin was noble. Medgar was noble and those kids were noble and it exposed an entire country, it exposed an entire civilization. Now we have to take it from there. (1973)