I think one of the things that started to hinder Baldwin as an artist later on was that he became really aware of power, so he wanted it, too. But if you look at the work before that, before 'The Fire Next Time' put him on the cover of 'Time Magazine,' it was much more intimate and a much more internal conversation.
I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.
I'm like a fire hose when the alarm goes off in a battle against a woman. Don't ever count me out.
During that year at Harvard learning with Carl Steinitz, I had the feeling that I was drinking knowledge out of a fire hose. I learned more in that year than I had learned in the previous ten years of my education.
As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.
News-free existence is not a serious proposal, but it is worth noting that while today's 24/7 media environment is wonderful in many ways, it can also be like drinking out of a fire hose and intensify a downward reinforcing cycle of despair.
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.
The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
In open range fires it is about picking a spot and hoping it is the right location. At the head of the fire you have to worry about wind and humidity and a number of other factors.
Have a dream, chase it down, jump over every single hurdle, and run through fire and ice to get there.
It was a very intense and stressful situation. There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day.
Once I was walking from The Mercer in New York - because otherwise I don't walk anywhere - and this woman paparazzo who was following me fell over a fire hydrant and her whole tooth went through her lip. I leant over her, saying, 'Are you all right?' and she was still taking pictures.
Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.
Some days you're the fire hydrant, and some days you're the dog.
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.
We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society.
The first time someone stood up in front of the fire and told the story while illustrating it with shadows on the walls of the quarry, that was the birth of theater.
