James Baldwin // “A great writer operates as an unimpeachable witness to one’s own experience; and one of the reasons that great writers are so rare...and their careers, in the main, so stormy...is that almost no one wishes to have his experience corroborated. I suppose that one of the reasons for this is that one’s actual experience cannot but assault one’s self-image, one’s aspirations, and one’s safety. We all attempt to live on the surface, where we assume we will be less lonely, whereas experience is of the depths and is dictated by what we really fear and hate and love as distinguished from what we think we ought to fear and hate and love."