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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

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Hilton Als
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Journalist
Theatre Critic
Writer
New York City
New York
Social
Twenties
Shaped
Hard
Sadness
Hasn
Great
Putting
Whereas
Something
Amazing
Forty
Time
Especially
Aids
Life
Since
Entirely
People
Almost
Twenty
Experience
Instance
Comprehend

More quotes by Hilton Als

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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
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People have a copyright on their own life.
Hilton Als
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I used to always love taking photos, but I would always give a camera away to someone else. Now I don't give the camera away anymore. It also takes a long time to develop a visual style, and I think that the things that I was imitating were people I love, like Judy Linn or Gerald Turner, and then it slowly started to become more myself.
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People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control.
Hilton Als
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People approach people of color with preconceived ideas. I don't think this is just restricted to white people, but I think that lots of black and white artists, when race is a subject matter, they put race or the ideology around race first. They don't see the person and the complications of the human being.
Hilton Als
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I think you're not really teaching anyone unless you're learning yourself.
Hilton Als
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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.
Hilton Als
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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
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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
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I think writing is an act of remembrance, I think that Instagram is an act of remembrance, and I think curating a show is an act of memory, too.
Hilton Als