Hilton Als quotes:

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.

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.'.

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.

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

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

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

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

I don't know what makes fashion cruel, except I feel nothing but spiritual depletion around it. There's nothing enriching, spiritually.

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

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.

Every time I put a collection together I'd scrap it because there was no "meaning," until I wrote about the two black men - friends - in the beginning of the book. So much of their experience was ABOUT trying to find friends in the authors/artists I wrote about - subjects that were/are a source of comfort, somehow, since none of them "fit," either

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.

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.

I don't make a lot of money, but I get to have freedom.

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 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!

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 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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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!

People have a copyright on their own life.