Quotes from Hilton Als

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

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

My love of performers is not really different than my love for painters. Everyone's really high-strung and trying to do the best they can.

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.

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

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.

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

'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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 think you're not really teaching anyone unless you're learning yourself.

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.

If you want to take writing on, you should pay writing the respect it deserves, which is to say, reading it.

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 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.

My self encompasses a lot of different things.

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.

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.

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