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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.

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
Age: 63
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Angeles
Passed
York
City
Cities
Sleep
Sleeps
Always
Couch
Never
Couches

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There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.
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If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
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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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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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The other thing [my psychology professor] said to me was that I was always very mindful of the person who was away from the group, that I was always trying to bring them in.
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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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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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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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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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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'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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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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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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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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It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
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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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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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