“I’m one of those crazy people who have to write every day. Otherwise, I feel really sort of despondent, and it’s because I don’t feel very happy about not learning.”
― Hilton Als
“If you have a word of encouragement, you can do anything.”
― Hilton Als
“I think what we’re attracted to on the page is something that is very difficult to do in life, which is to examine in what seems like a moment. To examine what we can’t do in life very well, which is to be as present and accountable to what an experience is. That’s why life is short and art is very long.”
― Hilton Als
“My self encompasses a lot of different things.”
― Hilton Als
“People have a copyright on their own life.”
― Hilton Als
“I’m attracted to people who work their little plot of land and cultivate it and cultivate it.”
― Hilton Als
“Boredom means you develop your own interior life.”
― Hilton Als
“Racism seduces us with its desire to categorize, shutting out the living and breathing and ‘different’ world all around us.”
― Hilton Als
“I grew up in a largely black community during the ’70s and ’80s that scoffed at ‘white’ music. That music – folk, rock, some disco – was considered soulless, aberrant, just one more example of the Caucasian’s desire to scream and yell and demand whatever their privilege and perpetual adolescence dictated they should demand.”
― Hilton Als
“Inspiration takes many forms, but it’s rarely pure.”
― Hilton Als
“My mother reveres artists, and my sister and I have inherited her love of art and the stories about its creation.”
― Hilton Als
“Our wishes are our most reliable mirror, and the black-and-white movies I’m most drawn to are about artists who suffer because art is a noble thing; suffering is such a small price to pay for the imagination.”
― Hilton Als
“I don’t think that there are many, many strong, black male role models who provide a certain kind of really American, Southern-based comfort that Madea grows out of. She’s a signpost in our Obama world of traditional Christian values.”
― Hilton Als
“I think that Tyler Perry’s genius really has been to tap into the domestic market. He knows what his audience is based on, having toured America for so long, and then giving them the blueprint for his films prior to the films coming out, and then the films have the built-in audience because they’ve seen it in theaters already.”
― Hilton Als
“I think someone like Khandi Alexander, who’s now on ‘Treme,’ is one of the most extraordinary actresses I’ve seen in years. But she’s dependent on someone brilliant like David Simon to realize that and to give her a forum. Tyler Perry’s not interested in that kind of nuance because it doesn’t sell.”
― Hilton Als
“It’s dollars before art in Hollywood.”
― Hilton Als
“Julius Eastman is the kind of American genius not enough people know about.”
― Hilton Als
“Dramas about addiction can be exciting to watch. And then dispiriting. Exciting because degradation is fascinating to follow from the relative safety and smugness of an ‘appropriate’ life, and dispiriting because if all that sad mayhem can happen to this or that character, what’s to keep it from happening to me or you?”
― Hilton Als
“Black excellence is a thing. People – from Beyonce Knowles to Venus and Serena Williams to folks you haven’t heard of – are into it. It’s less a movement than a standard: believers set the bar high not only for themselves but also for others who share their vision, especially when it pertains to black history, stories, and style.”
― Hilton Als
“I think that when I’m telling a story, I’m doing the best I can to tell the story as fully as I can, and if there are various fractures that happen in the story, then that’s just the very thing that the story is as opposed to my looking for avenues of difference in one story. They just really do exist. For me, anyway.”
― Hilton Als
“I think that writers are best served by sticking to their writing. Not having loads of theories about the best way to position the writing. I think that if the writing is good and the point of view is strong, the writing is going to take care of itself.”
― Hilton Als
“I am always attracted to people who are not myself but are.”
― Hilton Als
“In the contemporary world, artists are almost entirely self-referential.”
― Hilton Als
“Of course a magazine is shaped by its editor, and each editor is different.”
― Hilton Als
“I have not seen ‘The Lion King.’ I don’t do black folklore. And I’m black.”
― Hilton Als
“Broadway is not about surprises. It’s about rewarding the putrid, formulaic crap that makes Broadway Broadway.”
― Hilton Als
“I never feel like I’ve done anything. Swear to God. I’m not kidding. So it’s always a surprise when somebody asks me to do anything.”
― Hilton Als
“I love writing. Writing has been very good to me.”
― Hilton Als
“My love of performers is not really different than my love for painters. Everyone’s really high-strung and trying to do the best they can.”
― Hilton Als
“Women have an ability to be still in a way men don’t.”
― Hilton Als
“I believe that one reason I began writing essays – a form without a form, until you make it – was this: you didn’t have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story.”
― Hilton Als
“It’s very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don’t make portraiture ideological in some way.”
― Hilton Als
“I think writing is an act of remembrance, I think that Instagram is an act of remembrance, and I think curating a show is an act of memory, too.”
― Hilton Als
“I think I’m just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure.”
― Hilton Als
“In general, what we really want is a feeling when we read anything that the author has explored the territory as dutifully and as thoroughly as their spirit allows and as their heart allows.”
― Hilton Als
“I envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it’s true or false.”
― Hilton Als
“I was an actor for a little bit. That’s when I started to understand fiction – and that one of the great things about fiction is that you’re dependent on the characters as much as they’re dependent on you.”
― Hilton Als
“Nothing is more flattering for a writer than when someone knows your work.”
― Hilton Als
“What I feel is there are certain demands that you have to satisfy in any piece of writing. When it’s just for me, it’s just for me, but if it’s a piece for a particular publication, I know what they’re going to ask for.”
― Hilton Als
“If I feel like I haven’t really tapped into the essence of the story when I do an assignment, I may revisit it on my own, and that’s when I feel freer to add my imagination. But I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn’t do it in a journalistic context, because then you’re just fabricating, and that’s crazy.”
― Hilton Als
“One of the things I liked about writing for a magazine was a kind of anonymity. When you do books, it’s different than magazine pieces because you become a ‘figure.’”
― Hilton Als
“One of the things that’s great about writing for a magazine is that every week you get to be a different person. You’re writing different things all the time and not slogging along for years on something.”
― Hilton Als
“Eminem was someone that I discovered I liked, largely because of his relationship to language and to his mother.”
― Hilton Als
“When you work at a magazine, you have to tell the truth. When you’re not working in that format, it’s fun to see where your mind takes you when the dictates have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.”
― Hilton Als
“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.”
― Hilton Als
“If you want to take writing on, you should pay writing the respect it deserves, which is to say, reading it.”
― Hilton Als
“I didn’t like ’12 Years a Slave’ because it was playing to the Spielbergian model of redemption.”
― Hilton Als
“I’m not one of those people who’s against all-black productions of Tennessee Williams plays, but there are lot more complex and natural ways to bring people of color into the theater.”
― Hilton Als
“There is not enough time for anything, ever.”
― Hilton Als
“I suppose that there are many novels that are set during the summer because it’s a lonely time of year. Friends come and go, comfort comes and goes, which makes it a perfect time of year to indulge in melancholia.”
― Hilton Als
“I love Andre Leon Talley as a person.”
― Hilton Als
“I don’t know what else teaches you as much as writing. Perhaps reading. So if I don’t have one or the other in the course of the day, I feel old.”
― Hilton Als
“I think that you don’t really want to write a book that doesn’t really move people and doesn’t get them to think.”
― Hilton Als
“I think, what’s the point of writing a book that you would get in one sitting?”
― Hilton Als
“Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals.”
― Hilton Als
“American musicals are, for the most part, about boys, or boyish pursuits and aspirations – the fantasy of freedom and resolve – and those dreams have little to do with the reality of most black women’s lives.”
― Hilton Als
“’Moonlight’ undoes our expectations as viewers, and as human beings, too. As we watch, another movie plays in our minds: real-life footage of the many forms of damage done to black men, which can sometimes lead them to turn that hateful madness on their own kind, passing on the poison that was their inheritance.”
― Hilton Als
“I used to think that the feeling of alienation that I would have was just me, but I realise that it’s also a symptom of the modern world.”
― Hilton Als
“For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don’t like.”
― Hilton Als
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