Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love Andre Leon Talley as a person.
People have a copyright on their own life.
There is not enough time for anything, ever.
My self encompasses a lot of different things.
Boredom means you develop your own interior life.
Inspiration takes many forms, but it's rarely pure.
I'm a draftsperson. And also, I really respond to love.
I don't make a lot of money, but I get to have freedom.
If you have a word of encouragement, you can do anything.
Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.
I envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it's true or false.
In the contemporary world, artists are almost entirely self-referential.
Nothing is more flattering for a writer than when someone knows your work.
I have not seen 'The Lion King.' I don't do black folklore. And I'm black.
I think you're not really teaching anyone unless you're learning yourself.
Of course a magazine is shaped by its editor, and each editor is different.
Julius Eastman is the kind of American genius not enough people know about.
People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control.
I'm attracted to people who work their little plot of land and cultivate it and cultivate it.
I didn't like '12 Years a Slave' because it was playing to the Spielbergian model of redemption.
For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like.
Broadway is not about surprises. It's about rewarding the putrid, formulaic crap that makes Broadway Broadway.
It's very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don't make portraiture ideological in some way.
Eminem was someone that I discovered I liked, largely because of his relationship to language and to his mother.
My mother reveres artists, and my sister and I have inherited her love of art and the stories about its creation.
I feel like there are so few girls in New York like that anymore, who are not focused on getting a man with money.
Racism seduces us with its desire to categorize, shutting out the living and breathing and 'different' world all around us.
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 really don't think we should dismiss a book because we feel messed about intellectually. Or emotionally. That's the writer's job!
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 don't know what makes fashion cruel, except I feel nothing but spiritual depletion around it. There's nothing enriching, spiritually.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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'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.
One of the things I liked about writing for a magazine was a kind of anonymity. When you do books, it's different than magazine pieces because you become a 'figure.'
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'm not one of those people who's against all-black productions of Tennessee Williams plays, but there are lot more complex and natural ways to bring people of color into the theater.
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.'
In general, what we really want is a feeling when we read anything that the author has explored the territory as dutifully and as thoroughly as their spirit allows and as their heart allows.
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.
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.
When you work at a magazine, you have to tell the truth. When you're not working in that format, it's fun to see where your mind takes you when the dictates have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.
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.