Top 63 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Beatty

I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything. It's not something I feel comfortable doing. But sometimes I would get frustrated, I'd think, "You know, this is a good book, how come no one is paying attention to it?" So it's nice to have some recognition. I don't write to put it in a drawer, I hope that people see it. But what am I willing to do for that? I struggle with that a little bit. I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner. I'll say this, and it'll sound like bullshit, but it's not: I don't really pay attention to this stuff very much.

If I'm in LA, I'm close to home, and that just brings up all these other things, good and bad. There is a reason why I am not there .

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.

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.

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

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.

The Sellout is about friends and relatives who have touched me in real ways.

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

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.

I can't say that I love writing, but I do love the satisfaction that it gives me.

There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.

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

We don't act the same in every situation. Things bleed into all kinds of other things, from behavior to identity.

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.

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.

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

My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate."

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.

I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.

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 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."

I'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].

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.

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.

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.

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

If I'm in LA, I'm close to home, and that just brings up all these other things, good and bad. There is a reason why I am not there. That's what I have to remind myself of. But I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I've written a little bit in Germany.

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.

The thing is that it's always a constant reminder of how violent this country has been, always has been, you know. I'm still frustrated with these conversations: [Barack] Obama is black so that means this, that things are better, or it means that you voted for him because he's black.

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 try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.

I've also never written anything really in LA.

Like when you have the right title for something you're writing and you get lost - you can always go back to the title and go, "Yeah, that's what this is about."

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.

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 work.

Sometimes I would get frustrated, I'd think, "You know, this is a good book, how come no one is paying attention to it?" So it's nice to have some recognition.

I'm doing all these interviews with the British press, the Italian press, and others. They all want to talk about this stuff. I don't have a stance; I don't have a go-to thing to say about any of this.

I'll say this, and it'll sound like bullshit, but it's not: I don't really pay attention to this stuff [Man Booker Prize] very much. I think part of it is I can see myself wondering who's doing what and getting jealous, and none of that's healthy for me. So I just don't really.

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.

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

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.

Even when it comes to writing fiction, how do you encompass all this stuff that's right on the tip of your tongue? You have to fold that into what you're working on.

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.

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 wrote poems and an essay about that weird language. We still remember it to a certain extent, and it still comes up when we're all together. It's so fundamental to how I think.

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.

My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm not very pious about anything, fortunately, but I'm skewering myself first. I'm skewering things that I care about and things that are important to me and then just my own foibles.