Quote

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: 63
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Time
Anger
Worth
Courses
Course
Fear
Live
Going
Hierarchy
Long
Global

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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
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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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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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I've also never written anything really in LA.
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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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People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
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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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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 hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
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