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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
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LA
California
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Civil
Slavery
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More quotes by Paul Beatty
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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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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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.
Paul Beatty
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
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
It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
Paul Beatty
I'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
Paul Beatty
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.
Paul Beatty
I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
Paul Beatty
I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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I've also never written anything really in LA.
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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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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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If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
Paul Beatty
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
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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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
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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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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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