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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
Lines
Speak
Stuff
Trying
Really
Think
Propriety
Thinking
Line
Fun

More quotes by Paul Beatty

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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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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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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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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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I've also never written anything really in LA.
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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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It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
Paul Beatty
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People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.
Paul Beatty
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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.
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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.
Paul Beatty
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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 had a student once come up to me and we were talking about this incident, and, of course, I never had the right thing to say. But later on, I realized I should have said: 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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I'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
Paul Beatty
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If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
Paul Beatty
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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.
Paul Beatty
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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.
Paul Beatty
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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.
Paul Beatty
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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.
Paul Beatty
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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.
Paul Beatty