Hilton Als Quotes

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.

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.

That's how you recognize love: you've never met it before.

I'd look on as old men walked down city streets arm in arm with their wives. I would watch babies resting on their mothers' bellies in patches of grass and sunlight in Central Park. I would watch cigarette-smoking teenagers glittering with meanness and youth, whispering and laughing as they shopped on lower Broadway. These exchanges of intimacy were all the same to me because they excluded me [...]

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!

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.

Writers' bodies don't make sense in a place like Hollywood: soft and white, defenseless in a town where everyone's defended, right up to their celluloid tits.

Toni's greatness as a novelist had a lot to do with her skill - her great ability - to show how we mucked up the landscape, not just in the world, but in ourselves. Slavery was one way we mucked it up, of course, and the enormous wound at the center of "Beloved" (1988) has to do with how slavery not only killed bodies, but made a mess of our minds, thus creating a particularly American way of thinking.

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?

I feel like there are so few girls in New York like that anymore, who are not focused on getting a man with money.

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 really don't think we should dismiss a book because we feel messed about intellectually. Or emotionally. That's the writer's job!

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.

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.

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.

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.

I'm a draftsperson. And also, I really respond to love.

I think it's cultural racism more than anything, which dovetails with actual racism, but the cultural racism to me is even more shocking.

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

But what galled our audience, really, is the fact that our friendship grew out of wanting to interest each other. We wanted the world to have no part in it.

People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control.

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.

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.'.

People have a copyright on their own life.

Part of our shared tragedy - we recognized it at once - was that we never separated from our mothers, which meant we liked girls more than the world like them, which is to say more than they liked each other, let alone themselves.

Challenging is good, like good conversation, yes? Who wants to have dinner with the same old easy listening music sounding friends all the time?

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