Baldwin on Shyness

BALDWIN: I had to be released from a terrible shyness—an illusion that I could hide anything from anybody.

INTERVIEWER: I would think that anyone who could time after time, and without notes, address a congregation would never be shy again.

BALDWIN: I was scared then and I’m scared now. Communication is a two-way street, really, it’s a matter of listening to one another. During the civil-rights movement I was in the back of a church in Tallahassee and the pastor, who recognized me, called my name and asked me to say a few words. I was thirty-four and had left the pulpit seventeen years before. The moment in which I had to stand up and walk down the aisle and stand in that pulpit was the strangest moment in my life up to that time. I managed to get through it and when I walked down from the pulpit and back up the aisle, a little old black lady in the congregation said to a friend of hers, “He’s little, but he’s loud!”
- James Baldwin, Paris Review interview