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" 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. "

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" 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

Feel

Painting

Colors

" If you want to take writing on, you should pay writing the respect it deserves, which is to say, reading it. "

" Nothing is more flattering for a writer than when someone knows your work. "

Hilton Als

Work

Nothing

" It's very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don't make portraiture ideological in some way. "

" If you have a word of encouragement, you can do anything. "

" 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. "

" Racism seduces us with its desire to categorize, shutting out the living and breathing and 'different' world all around us. "

" Eminem was someone that I discovered I liked, largely because of his relationship to language and to his mother. "

" 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. "

" I am always attracted to people who are not myself but are. "

Hilton Als

Always

I Am

" I love writing. Writing has been very good to me. "

Hilton Als

Writing

Very

" I love Andre Leon Talley as a person. "

" Boredom means you develop your own interior life. "

" 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. "

" I have not seen 'The Lion King.' I don't do black folklore. And I'm black. "

" It's dollars before art in Hollywood. "

" My self encompasses a lot of different things. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In the contemporary world, artists are almost entirely self-referential. "

" I didn't like '12 Years a Slave' because it was playing to the Spielbergian model of redemption. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm attracted to people who work their little plot of land and cultivate it and cultivate it. "