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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
Number
Protect
Numbers
Words
Reason
Find
Hard
Mean
Reasons

More quotes by Paul Beatty

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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.
Paul Beatty
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It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
Paul Beatty
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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've also never written anything really in LA.
Paul Beatty
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I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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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.
Paul Beatty
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I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
Paul Beatty
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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.
Paul Beatty
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There are always so many things happening [to us] at one time. We read Isherwood's A Single Man in class, and we had to ask: How is he talking about all this stuff: teaching, being lonely, all his memories, all at the same time? He's telling us: This is where my head is at, let me be straightforward. And of course, try be artful about it.
Paul Beatty
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I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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.
Paul Beatty
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My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, Contradiction is how we operate.
Paul Beatty
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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.
Paul Beatty
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There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.
Paul Beatty
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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.
Paul Beatty
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I co-taught a seminar called Small Group Processes with my professor. I learned so much from it, so much about myself, about groups, how this stuff works. I bring all that stuff to teaching now.
Paul Beatty
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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.
Paul Beatty
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If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
Paul Beatty
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All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.
Paul Beatty