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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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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
People
Views
Cross
Point
Nervous
Everyone
Crosses
Easy
Necessarily
Country
Scared
Thing
Angry
Rode
Think
View
Justified
Thinking
Afraid
Noticed

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I'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
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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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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
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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've also never written anything really in LA.
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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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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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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'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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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 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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I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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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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It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
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