Paul Beatty Quotes

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

Paul Beatty

#2. 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.

Paul Beatty

#3. It was hard to say if the statement was some sort of suicidal ideation, but one could hope.

Paul Beatty

#4. It'd taken only a few hours, but I felt like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.

Paul Beatty

#5. 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.

Paul Beatty

#6. Bemoan being lower-middle-class and colored in a police state that protects only rich white people and movie stars of all races, though I can't think of any Asian-American ones.

Paul Beatty

#7. Foy was no Tree of Knowledge, at most he was a Bush of Opinion

Paul Beatty

#8. Because I knew that racist Negro Archetypes, like Bebe's Kids, don't die. They multiply.

Paul Beatty

#9. Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction.

Paul Beatty

#10. 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

#11. That's the problem with this generation; they don't know their history.

Paul Beatty

#12. Julie Christie, I used to hang out with her. She was friends with Richard Pryor and Warren Beatty and all of them. There was a club in Beverly Hills called the Candy Store, a private club. I used to hang out with them all.

Paul Mooney

#13. They say a cigarette takes three minutes off your life, but good hashish makes dying seem so far away.

Paul Beatty

#14. Dumbfounded, I stood before the court, trying to figure out if there was a state of being between "guilty" and "innocent." Why were those my only alternatives? I thought. Why couldn't I be "neither" or "both"? After a long pause, I finally faced the bench and said, "Your Honor, I plead human.

Paul Beatty

#15. People eat the shit you shovel them.

Paul Beatty

#16. That crap about being better off under slavery is too much even for you, isn't it, Foy?'
'At least McJones cares.'
'Come on, he cares about black people like a seven-footer cares about football. He has to care because what else would he be good at.

Paul Beatty

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

Paul Beatty

#18. For those looking to find the thing that you've lost, the decision of where to place your handbill is one of the toughest you'll ever make in life.

Paul Beatty

#19. I think about my own silence. Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it's fear. I guess that's why I'm so quiet and such a good whisperer,

Paul Beatty

#20. He was less like a tree of knowledge and more like a bush of opinions." From the book "The Sellout

Paul Beatty

#21. Like the good Reverend King
I too 'have a dream'
but when I wake up
I forget it and
remember I'm running late for work.

Paul Beatty

#22. If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you'd either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.

Paul Beatty

#23. [T]he Supreme Court is where the country takes out its dick and tits and decides who's going to get fucked and who's getting a taste of mother's milk. It's constitutional pornography in there[.]

Paul Beatty

#24. Don't tell me Kinshasa, the poorest city in the poorest country in the world, a place where the average per capita income is one goat bell, two bootleg Michael Jackson cassette tapes, and three sips of potable water per year, thinks we're too poor to associate with.

Paul Beatty

#25. We recognized the face he was wearing as a mask from our own collections. The happy mask we carry in our back pockets, and like bank robbers whip out when we want to steal some privacy or make an emotional getaway.

Paul Beatty

#26. I wasn't fed; I was presented with lukewarm appetitive stimuli. I wasn't punished, but broken of my unconditioned reflexes. I wasn't loved, but brought up in an atmosphere of calculated intimacy and intense levels of commitment.

Paul Beatty

#27. The formulaic repetitiveness of filing and stuffing envelopes appeals to me in some fundamental life-affirming way.

Paul Beatty

#28. ...true freedom is having the right to be a slave.

Paul Beatty

#29. Not surprisingly, there's nothing to do at the Pentagon except start a war.

Paul Beatty

#30. The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go.

Paul Beatty

#31. My father had a theory that poor people are the best drivers because they can't afford to carry car insurance and have to drive like they live, defensively.

Paul Beatty

#32. ...you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? And how may I become myself?

Paul Beatty

#33. During the height of the government enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, some segregated townships filled in their municipal pools rather than let nonwhite kids share in the perverse joy of peeing in the water.

Paul Beatty

#34. I don't know exactly what a black Chinese restaurant would be, but I would sure love to see one.

Paul Beatty

#35. This traffic-court jester did more than tell jokes; he plucked out your subconscious and beat you silly with it, not until you were unrecognizable, but until you were recognizable.

Paul Beatty

#36. The face that feigns acknowledgment that the better man got the promotion, even though deep down you and they both know that you really are the better man and that the best man is the woman on the second floor.

Paul Beatty

#37. He wants to believe that Shakespeare wrote all those books, that Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves and the United States fought World War II to rescue the Jews and keep the world safe for democracy, that Jesus and the double feature are coming back. But I'm no Panglossian American.

Paul Beatty

#38. Weary and stuffed from being force-fed the falsehood that when one of your kind makes it, it means that you've all made it.

Paul Beatty

#39. Hereos. Idols. They're never who you think they are. Shorter. Nastier. Smellier. And when you finally meet them, there's something that makes you want to choke the shit out of them.

Paul Beatty

#40. That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book - that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

Paul Beatty

#41. Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it's the nihilism that makes life worth living.

Paul Beatty

#42. One of the many sad ironies of African-American life is that every banal dysfunctional social gathering is called a "function.

Paul Beatty

#43. The meetings consisted mostly of the members who showed up every other week arguing with the ones who came every other month about what exactly "bimonthly" means. I

Paul Beatty

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

Paul Beatty

#45. Washington, D.C., with its wide streets, confounding roundabouts, marble statues, Doric columns, and domes, is supposed to feel like ancient Rome (that is, if the streets of ancient Rome were lined with homeless black people, bomb-sniffing dogs, tour buses, and cherry blossoms).

Paul Beatty

#46. And like that black president, you'd think that after two terms of looking at a dude in a suit deliver the State of the Union address, you'd get used to square watermelons, but somehow you never do.

Paul Beatty

#47. She was thinking about how her middle-school alma mater was now 75 percent Latino, when in her day it was 80 percent black. Thinking

Paul Beatty

#48. The wretched of the Earth, he calls us. People too poor to afford cable and too stupid to know that they aren't missing anything.

Paul Beatty

#49. 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

#50. And although like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I'm bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages, I understood the gist of the message.

Paul Beatty

#51. No one has, because even in this middle age, he's sensitive, and if you say the wrong thing, he'll show the world just how sensitive he is by crying at your funeral.

Paul Beatty

#52. One's self-worth comes from how one chooses to navigate that space.

Paul Beatty

#53. It's illegal to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theater, right?" "It is." "Well, I've whispered 'Racism' in a post-racial world.

Paul Beatty

#54. Like Nazis at a Ku Klux Klan rally, they were comfortable ideologically, but not in terms of corporate culture.

Paul Beatty

#55. I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

Paul Beatty

#56. Congratulations, you may already be a winner! Your case has been selected from hundreds of other appellate cases to be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Paul Beatty

#57. Most couples have songs they call their own. We had books. Authors. Artists. Silent movies.

Paul Beatty

#58. Sometimes just making yourself at home is revolutionary.

Paul Beatty

#59. 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.

Paul Beatty

#60. And if you think about it, pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage: the Apple computer, the Boogie Board, and gangster rap.

Paul Beatty

#61. Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it's fear.

Paul Beatty

#62. That's the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity.

Paul Beatty

#63. Man, didn't anybody ever tell you that art is propaganda? It doesn't matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn't be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you're sitting on a funky Magna Carta.

Paul Beatty

#64. It's like the specter of segregation has brought the city of Dickens back together again." I decided to give my new career as City Planner in Charge of Restoration and Segregation another six months. If things didn't work out, I could always fall back on being black.

Paul Beatty

#65. If he was indeed an "autodidact," there's no doubt he had the world's shittiest teacher.

Paul Beatty

#66. Sometimes I wish Darth Vader had been my father. I'd have been better off. I wouldn't have a right hand, but I definitely wouldn't have the burden of being black and constantly having to decide when and if I gave a shit about it. Plus, I'm left-handed.

Paul Beatty

#67. And if an increasingly pluralistic America ever decides to commission a new motto, I'm open for business, because I've got a better one than E pluribus unum. Tu dormis, tu perdis ... You snooze, you lose.

Paul Beatty