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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.
Paul Beatty
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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
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More quotes by Paul Beatty
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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My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, Contradiction is how we operate.
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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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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 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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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 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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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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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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I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
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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.
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I think, and a lot of that has to do with where I grew up in California [status] isn't something I think about that much.
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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 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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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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