Quote

People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.

Paul Beatty

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Movement
Retrospectively
Rights
Etc
Race
Relations
People
Civil
Slavery
Relation
Looked
Comfortable

More quotes by Paul Beatty

Image
I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
Paul Beatty
Image
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.
Paul Beatty
Image
It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
Paul Beatty
Image
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
Image
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.
Paul Beatty
Image
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.
Paul Beatty
Image
I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
Paul Beatty
Image
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.
Paul Beatty
Image
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.
Paul Beatty
Image
If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.
Paul Beatty
Image
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
Image
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.
Paul Beatty
Image
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.
Paul Beatty
Image
All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.
Paul Beatty
Image
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.
Paul Beatty
Image
There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.
Paul Beatty
Image
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.
Paul Beatty
Image
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.
Paul Beatty
Image
There are things I don't like, like sitting at the head of the class. It makes me uncomfortable. I'll do it in a seminar if I have to, but with a workshop, I try to put myself in the circle somewhere. Because that hopefully frees up some people by making somebody else sit at the nominal head of the table.
Paul Beatty
Image
I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
Paul Beatty