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I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Healthier
Happier
California
Probably
Maybe
Littles
Little

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 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 try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
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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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If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
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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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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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All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.
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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've also never written anything really in LA.
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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, Contradiction is how we operate.
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I'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
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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 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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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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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.
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There are things I don't like, like sitting at the head of the class. It makes me uncomfortable. I'll do it in a seminar if I have to, but with a workshop, I try to put myself in the circle somewhere. Because that hopefully frees up some people by making somebody else sit at the nominal head of the table.
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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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