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" 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

You

Safety

Sad

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

" 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. "

" 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

Think

Story

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

Hilton Als

Always

I Am

" I love Andre Leon Talley as a person. "

" 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. "

" 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 think, what's the point of writing a book that you would get in one sitting? "

" My mother reveres artists, and my sister and I have inherited her love of art and the stories about its creation. "

" Inspiration takes many forms, but it's rarely pure. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People have a copyright on their own life. "

Hilton Als

People

Own

" 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

Going

Feel

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like. "

" 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. "

" There is not enough time for anything, ever. "

" Women have an ability to be still in a way men don't. "

" 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 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 envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it's true or false. "

" 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

People

Natural

" '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. "