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There's this line between propriety and how we really speak and how we really think. And I'm just trying to have fun with that stuff.

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Really
Think
Propriety
Thinking
Line
Fun
Lines
Speak
Stuff
Trying

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All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.
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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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It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words.
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Why are the mainstream buzz things rarely contemporary? It doesn't happen very often. It's hard to feel culpable or implicated or even apathetic.
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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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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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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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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.
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I don't try to be satirical. I just try to get what's in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.
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If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.
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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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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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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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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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I think, and a lot of that has to do with where I grew up in California [status] isn't something I think about that much.
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I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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Sometimes I would get frustrated, I'd think, You know, this is a good book, how come no one is paying attention to it? So it's nice to have some recognition.
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I just rode cross-country and the thing I noticed is just how afraid everyone is, and how nervous and scared and angry people are. From my point of view, I don't think it's all necessarily justified, but I think that's easy for me to say.
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My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, Contradiction is how we operate.
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I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
Paul Beatty