"The importance of the writer is continuous; his importance, I think is that he is here to describe things which other people are too busy to describe . . . It's a very difficult thing to do, it's a very special thing to do and people who do it cannot by that token do many other things. But their importance is, and the importance of writers in this country now is this, that this country is yet to be discovered in any real sense . . . Without having anything whatever against Cadillacs, refrigerators, or all the paraphernalia of American life, I yet suspect that there is something much more important and much more real which produces the Cadillac, refrigerator, atom bomb, and what produces it, afterall, is something which we don't seem to want to look at, and that is the person . . . A country is only as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become . . . We made the world we're living in and we have to make it over." - James Baldwin, "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel"
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