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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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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Course
Fear
Live
Going
Hierarchy
Long
Global
Time
Anger
Worth
Courses

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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 dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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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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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'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, Contradiction is how we operate.
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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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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 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 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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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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If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.
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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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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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I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
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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
Paul Beatty