Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Suffering

Imagination

Art

" 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 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. "

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

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

Hilton Als

Writing

Very

" I love Andre Leon Talley as a person. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Hilton Als

Always

I Am

" 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'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

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" Julius Eastman is the kind of American genius not enough people know about. "

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

" Broadway is not about surprises. It's about rewarding the putrid, formulaic crap that makes Broadway Broadway. "

" 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 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. "