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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: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Always
Couch
Never
Couches
Angeles
Passed
York
City
Cities
Sleep
Sleeps

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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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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 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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It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
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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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All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.
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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 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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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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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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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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