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" 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. "

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" 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

Change

Black

Women

" 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. "

" Boredom means you develop your own interior life. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Hilton Als

Work

Nothing

" 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. "

" Of course a magazine is shaped by its editor, and each editor is different. "

" 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. "

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

Hilton Als

Writing

Very

" People have a copyright on their own life. "

Hilton Als

People

Own

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "