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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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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Firsts
First
Korea
Fought
Dad
Hearing
Stories
Remember

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I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
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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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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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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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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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The other thing [my psychology professor] said to me was that I was always very mindful of the person who was away from the group, that I was always trying to bring them in.
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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 hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
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I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
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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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People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.
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I've also never written anything really in LA.
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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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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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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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