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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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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Think
Recognition
Thinking
Nice
Attention
Book
Come
Sometimes
Good
Frustrated
Would
Paying

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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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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It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
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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.
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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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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 dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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Well, it's not all the same, but there are a lot of parallels. I'm not sure how to answer [on psychology background], but I think when I was studying psychology I had a professor and a friend who would talk about process all the time. Your process, his process, the group's process. There's some carryover from that discussion to my creative wor
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If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
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There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.
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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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I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
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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.
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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 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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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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People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.
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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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