70 Quotes by Hilton Als

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.

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'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 [...]

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.