“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
—James Baldwin
“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” —James Baldwin
The writer James Baldwin—the man who is, for my money, the greatest writer of the twentieth century—said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
James Baldwin • Notes of a Native Son
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books (Dostoevsky and Dickens) that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves c... See more
“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."
-Susan Sontag