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My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, Contradiction is how we operate.

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Poet
Friend
Good
Operate
Contradiction

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I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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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 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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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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All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.
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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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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 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'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
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If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
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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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If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.
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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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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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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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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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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 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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