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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.

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Really
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Protect
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Words
Reason
Find
Hard
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Reasons

More quotes by Paul Beatty

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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 try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
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It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
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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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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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I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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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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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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All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.
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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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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 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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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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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'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
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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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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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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.
Paul Beatty