James Baldwin // "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It...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... An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive."