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

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Race
Relations
People
Civil
Slavery
Relation
Looked
Comfortable
Movement
Retrospectively
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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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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
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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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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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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 try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
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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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All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.
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That's such a great book [Bloods]. That's a perfect way to articulate this thing that we're talking about. Just because someone is a black general, doesn't mean this person is going to have a certain outlook on it.
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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'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
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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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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