Quotes from Hilton Als

I think someone like Khandi Alexander, who's now on 'Treme,' is one of the most extraordinary actresses I've seen in years. But she's dependent on someone brilliant like David Simon to realize that and to give her a forum. Tyler Perry's not interested in that kind of nuance because it doesn't sell.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

longing to trust someone; I was making life a fiction, or writing

Is this what love gets up to, one person demanding self-exposure so there's more to love

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

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression," she wondered, "that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?

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.

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

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.

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.

I wanted to house myself in SL's thinking. It was so big and well lit, like a large house sitting solid on the bank of a river.

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 [...]

North Korea is perhaps the darkest place in the world. The country lacks electricity; everything is gray and monotone

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Hope dies all the time. And yet we need to believe it will come back and attach itself to a new cause - a new love, a new house, something that gives us a sense of purpose, which is ultimately what hope is.

Our experiences are painful and sometimes annihilating, and if we have the strength to crawl out of and excavate that wreckage, we have to ask ourselves how to describe the truth of it.

I cling to that story in The Symposium, of the two halves coming together in "an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight," because that's all I want to know.

I think that when I'm telling a story, I'm doing the best I can to tell the story as fully as I can, and if there are various fractures that happen in the story, then that's just the very thing that the story is as opposed to my looking for avenues of difference in one story. They just really do exist. For me, anyway.

I am always attracted to people who are not myself but are.