"Most people live in almost total darkness... people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don't know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which - if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define - you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn't ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don't cheat, if you don't lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope - because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it."
- James Baldwin