Your tweet is as important as if you would have written a Ph.D. [dissertation] on the subject.

Face your reality. You, black or white, are not innocent anymore. Either you have the courage to face it or you will go down together with the whole idea of the American Dream.

James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

Why would anything change that has not been changed since the existence of cinema? [James] Baldwin somehow wakes you up to reality. It takes you out of the dream - or out of the nightmare.

I just hope that my films will survive me.

Your tweet is as important as if you would have written a Ph.D. [dissertation] on the subject.

Over the years, he disappeared - like a lot of our leaders disappear. [James Baldwin] was not assassinated, but somehow he went through those assassinations as if it was himself. I think that broke him as well.