Paul Beatty Quotes

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.

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.

I don't write to put it in a drawer, I hope that people see it.

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.

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.

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

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.

It's weird because there is progress somehow. But there's so much that just feels the same. How important is that rank? How important is it that I am allowed to make these decisions? What does that really mean? What is progress? Is it progress that a black guy gets to push a button for the nuclear bomb? Is that progress? Maybe, I don't know.

In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history.

Maybe I'm just sensitive to that person who's on the outside.

I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .

It makes me think about how you hear these young people say, "I see you, man." Or even if you go and watch some basketball game over the summer and the announcer goes, "I see you," and you see that player smile. You know what I mean? That thing of just being recognized, especially when you do a little subtle thing. I don't know.

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.

In White Boy Shuffle, I combined my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Takemoto, who really saved me - I don't think I've ever told anyone this - and my first basketball coach, Mr. Shimizu, into one character. Something about the way they talked about things, and their attitudes, had a huge impact on me. Not that I necessarily agreed with them. It was important to me to just put them there to stay grounded.

I think there's nothing new going on. Except that, you're even more public than you've ever been.There's some good and some bad to that.

I think everybody focuses on race, but it's about a ton of things, and I just see these things as all interrelated and all interwoven in a weird way.

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.

Contradictions make people feel off. They'll say, "Hey, you just said this and now this person is doing that, how is that possible?"

It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.

It's just never the same. At least for me.It's probably because it's just who I am, I never know what that [truth] is. It's so momentary to go, "Oh, yeah, that's true." That's a fundamental starting point for me - to figure out what's true from moment to moment to moment.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

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.

My British publisher has this independent press. It's pretty small; they actually won last year. And she's got this great energy, and she's fiercely independent, and you know this book was a hard sell. No one wanted to buy this book. But she did, and so it's paid off for her, I hope.

I've written a little bit in Germany.