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If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
Paul Beatty
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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
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LA
California
Doors
Humor
Stage
Trap
Funny
Operate
Life
Traps
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Door
More quotes by Paul Beatty
We don't act the same in every situation. Things bleed into all kinds of other things, from behavior to identity.
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I'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
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It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
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I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
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I've also never written anything really in LA.
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I co-taught a seminar called Small Group Processes with my professor. I learned so much from it, so much about myself, about groups, how this stuff works. I bring all that stuff to teaching now.
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There are things I don't like, like sitting at the head of the class. It makes me uncomfortable. I'll do it in a seminar if I have to, but with a workshop, I try to put myself in the circle somewhere. Because that hopefully frees up some people by making somebody else sit at the nominal head of the table.
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There are always so many things happening [to us] at one time. We read Isherwood's A Single Man in class, and we had to ask: How is he talking about all this stuff: teaching, being lonely, all his memories, all at the same time? He's telling us: This is where my head is at, let me be straightforward. And of course, try be artful about it.
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There are many similarities between Germans and blacks. The nouns themselves are loaded with so much historical baggage it's impossible for anyone to be indifferent to the simple mention of either group. We're two insightful people looking for reasons to love ourselves and let's not forget we both love pork and wear sandals with socks.
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People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.
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I talk about folding it in often with Althea, my girlfriend. She's getting her doctoral degree at Berkeley and she talks about how even when writing these very academic, and, for the most part, serious papers there's just so much going on in her head and heart, and it's a reminder that there's a reason that she's studying these things.
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Well, it's not all the same, but there are a lot of parallels. I'm not sure how to answer [on psychology background], but I think when I was studying psychology I had a professor and a friend who would talk about process all the time. Your process, his process, the group's process. There's some carryover from that discussion to my creative wor
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Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.
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The anger and fear are so global. And of course, we live where we live and there's a hierarchy to who is worth what. It's been going on for a long, long time.
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Sometimes I highjack memories. Sometimes I switch them around. Sometimes they're just in the background, like some little bass note. Those things have carried me through, especially when I first started writing. They're still there, but more in the distance these days.
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That's such a great book [Bloods]. That's a perfect way to articulate this thing that we're talking about. Just because someone is a black general, doesn't mean this person is going to have a certain outlook on it.
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I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
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I remember going to see Amiri Baraka. It wasn't actually too long before he died. He said, You've got to write to change the world! I was like, Not me, no, no, no, no.
Paul Beatty
