Hilton Als

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

“It's dollars before art in Hollywood.”

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

“My self encompasses a lot of different things.”

“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?”

“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 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 am always attracted to people who are not myself but are.”

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

“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.”

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

“I love writing. Writing has been very good to me.”

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

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

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

“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 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.”

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