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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
Making
Stuff
Art
Feel
Feels
Angst
Tied
Ancient

More quotes by Paul Beatty

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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'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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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 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 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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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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There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.
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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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I've also never written anything really in LA.
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I'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
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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 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'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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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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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 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.
Paul Beatty
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I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
Paul Beatty
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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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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 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.
Paul Beatty