I’ve learned to live with rage. In some ways, it’s my rage that keeps me going. Without it, I would have been whipped long ago. With it, I got a lot more songs to sing.

When Tish cries for Fonny and longs for his freedom, she is the Baldwin voice expressing his life’s search for a lover free of the bondage of societies taboos, a lover whose presence could allow him to give birth not only to his art⎯Baldwin always spoke of his novels in terms of pregnancy and birth⎯but to a self free of the need to be a prophet, a spokesman free of the need to be anything other than a human being

To submit to nothing, whether to a man or a love or an idea, and to have the aloof independence of not believing in the truth or even (if it existed) in the usefulness of knowing it — this seems to me the right attitude for the intellectual inner life of those who can’t live without thinking. To belong is synonymous with banality. Creeds, ideals, a woman, a profession — all are prisons and shackles. To be is to be free. Even ambition, if we take pride in it, is a hindrance; we wouldn’t be proud of it if we realized it’s a string by which we’re pulled. No: no ties even to ourselves! Free from ourselves as well as from others, contemplatives without ecstasy, thinkers without conclusions and liberated from God, we will live the few moments of bliss allowed us in the prison yard by the distraction of our executioners. Tomorrow we will face the guillotine. Or if not tomorrow, then the day after that. Let us stroll about in the sun before the end comes, deliberately forgetting all projects and pursuits. Without wrinkles our foreheads will glow in the sun, and the breeze will be cool for those who quit hoping.
  I throw my pen against the slanted desk top and watch it roll down without bothering to catch it. I felt all of this without warning. And my happiness consists in this gesture of rage that I don’t feel.

“….raceless. sexless. nameless…me.”

It is about a specific person but I’ve always been very protective. I’ve never told the press who a song is about and I always make sure I tell the person themselves. I’ve shown people lyrics and asked them to live with them for a week, to make sure they would feel comfortable.

blanche, you have to have written to have writer’s block. otherwise, all of us have it.

i might be the palace protected by the wall. but i refuse protection: i am better laughing at the bottom of the wall.

the aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. his dreams are his protection against the world. but the aims of life are antiethical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.