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All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Feel
Feels
Angst
Tied
Ancient
Making
Stuff
Art

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It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
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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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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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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'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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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 hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
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I read an interview with a Japanese freestyle jazz musician once, and he said something like, Everything I'm going to tell you is not going to be true. He's not saying, I'm trying to lie to you. But he's kind of saying that you can never say what something really is.
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I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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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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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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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'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.
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There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.
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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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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 healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
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I forget how beautiful and calm California is. It's not so much about the place, but also the age that I came to the place and, well, other things. New York is hard.
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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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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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