Hilton Als Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 28 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Hilton Als.
Famous Quotes By Hilton Als
For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies. — Hilton Als
Claudia Rankine's Citizen comes at you like doom. It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. Its various realities-'mistaken' identity, social racism, the whole fabric of urban and suburban life-are almost too much to bear, but you bear them, because it's the truth. Citizen is Rankine's Spoon River Anthology, an epic as large and frightening and beautiful as the country and various emotional states that produced it. — Hilton Als
Images are really powerful. People fall in love with images, and as a way of falling in love with someone because they're like an image. — Hilton Als
The artist's memory is a dangerous, necessary thing. Never disavow what you see and remember-it's your brilliant stock-in-trade: remembering, and making something out of it. Artists remember the world as it is, first, because you have to know what it is you're reinventing; that's a rule, perhaps the only one: being cognizant of your source material. — Hilton Als
I think it's cultural racism more than anything, which dovetails with actual racism, but the cultural racism to me is even more shocking. — Hilton Als
People have a copyright on their own life. — Hilton Als
I think you're not really teaching anyone unless you're learning yourself. — Hilton Als
People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control. — Hilton Als
I was so well loved by my mother that if people have any expectations of me I really don't notice because I'm hardest on myself. — Hilton Als
I feel like there are so few girls in New York like that anymore, who are not focused on getting a man with money. — Hilton Als
Regardless of where many of us believe we land - in that field encumbered by not too much baggage or entirely too much - we all come from the same place, which is a road rutted by experience so banal, nearly remarkable, that memory tricks us into remembrance of it again and again, as if experience alone were not enough. What are we to do with such a life, one in which we are not left alone to events - love, shopping, and so forth - but to the holocaust of feeling that memory, misremembered or not, imposes on us? — Hilton Als
I really don't think we should dismiss a book because we feel messed about intellectually. Or emotionally. That's the writer's job! — Hilton Als
Who says reading should be easy? Shouldn't it challenge you as hard sometimes as love. Maybe "hard" is not the right word in this context. Ha! — Hilton Als
I don't know what makes fashion cruel, except I feel nothing but spiritual depletion around it. There's nothing enriching, spiritually. — Hilton Als
Inspiration takes many forms, but it's rarely pure. — Hilton Als
I thought of the structure as musical. The first piece, for instance, contains the names/subject matter of every person to come in the book. Like a piece of music with themes, etc. — Hilton Als
There were so few black men who were successful and who successfully conveyed black male fear - how America can make you feel crazy, and how America can create interesting levels of contradiction. — Hilton Als
Great sadness can be off putting, hard to comprehend, especially if it hasn't been your experience. It's amazing for me to know now that AIDS, for instance, is something a lot of people don't "get," whereas it entirely shaped my social life since the time I was twenty until I was almost forty. — Hilton Als
Nothing is more flattering for a writer than when someone knows your work. — Hilton Als
I'm a draftsperson. And also, I really respond to love. — Hilton Als
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
Challenging is good, like good conversation, yes? Who wants to have dinner with the same old easy listening music sounding friends all the time? — Hilton Als
One of the things I noticed when I worked at Vibe was that backstage at a fashion show, they always referred to the black models as "black girls." I thought, "They never say 'white girls.'. — Hilton Als
I had to re-write "Philosophy" a lot. It was more obscure than what's in the book now, even! Some things I had to go back to and excise my former self, who was even more dense. I think you should teach whatever you want, Brian! That's the point of books like White Girls, to help free our thoughts! — Hilton Als
I think Northern California is the most beautiful place on earth. And I adore New Orleans, but there's something about the air in SF, for instance. It changes from moment to moment, like one's thoughts. — Hilton Als
Every time I put a collection together I'd scrap it because there was no "meaning," until I wrote about the two black men - friends - in the beginning of the book. So much of their experience was ABOUT trying to find friends in the authors/artists I wrote about - subjects that were/are a source of comfort, somehow, since none of them "fit," either — Hilton Als
Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget. — Hilton Als