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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.

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Even
Contemporary
Things
Happen
Often
Implicated
Doesn
Culpable
Happens
Apathetic
Hard
Buzz
Feel
Mainstream
Feels
Rarely

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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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My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, Contradiction is how we operate.
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I've also never written anything really in LA.
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I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
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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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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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I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
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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 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 not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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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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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.
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There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.
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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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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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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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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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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
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