The role James Baldwin played in my life is incommensurable as stated above. He helped, along with a few others, to shape the man that I am today. My debt to him is invaluable.

[James] Baldwin is needed even more today because he helps you focus to the essential, to what is important.

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.

Just try to be yourself and resist complacency and ignorance. All you can do is work, work; work and be disciplined.

I just hope that my films will survive me.

Today, I don't even think that people like [James Baldwin] are possible. He would not have that much room.

You need to react. That's the absurdity of Twitter. You can react without thinking now.