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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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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Else
Happens
Certain
Things
Anywhere
York
Happen

More quotes by Paul Beatty

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I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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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 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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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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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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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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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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My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, Contradiction is how we operate.
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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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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.
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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
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If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
Paul Beatty
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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.
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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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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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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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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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.
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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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