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I'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Booker
Hugely
Honored
Prize
Men

More quotes by 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'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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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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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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.
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
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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 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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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 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.
Paul Beatty
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I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
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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My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, Contradiction is how we operate.
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 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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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 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