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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.

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Firsts
Memories
Bass
First
Started
Note
Sometimes
Days
Carried
Writing
Around
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Like
Still
Notes
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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 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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I'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
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If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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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'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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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 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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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'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'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
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My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, Contradiction is how we operate.
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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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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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There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.
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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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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've also never written anything really in LA.
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