James Baldwin

“If you wish to ask me what I cared about most now—if you ask me to state what was important or lasting—it would have to be that I walked and sat and dreamed next to a man named James Baldwin. James—or Jimmy—knew how to analyze, place, describe, repair, and destroy things—all in the right way and for the right reasons. Baldwin, as I liked to call him, taught me to think in a piercing way about things far more important than scripts or contracts or poems—he taught me to look into and understand people and their motives and their identities. And I didn’t always like what I saw, but it led me toward something that might be called freedom.”—Marlon Brando/Interview with James Grissom/1990