Paul Beatty Quotes

I tried to read this book, Huckleberry Finn, to my grandchildren, but I couldn't get past page six because the book is fraught with the 'n-word'. And although they are the deepest-thinking, combat-ready eight- and ten-year-olds I know, I knew my babies weren't ready to comprehent Huckleberry Finn on its own merits. That's why I took the liberty to rewrite Mark Twain's masterpiece. Where re repugnant 'n-word' occurs, I replaced it with 'warrior' and the word 'slave' with 'dark-skinned volunteer'.

At the zoo, I stood in front of the primate cage listening to a woman marvel at how "presidential" the four-hundred-pound gorilla looked sitting astride a shorn oaken limb, keeping a watchful eye over his caged brood. When her boyfriend, his finger tapping the informational placard, pointed out the "presidential" silverback's name coincidentally was Baraka, the woman laughed aloud, until she saw me, the other four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, stuffing something that might have been the last of a Big Stick Popsicle or a Chiquita banana in my mouth.

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.

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.

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.

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

In 7.81 square miles of vaunted black community, the 850 square feet of Dum Dum Donuts was the only place in the "community" where one could experience the Latin root of the word, where a citizen could revel in common togetherness. So one rainy Sunday afternoon, not long after the tanks and media attention had left, my father ordered his usual. He sat at the table nearest the ATM and said aloud, to no one in particular, "Do you know that the average household net worth for whites is $113,149 per year, Hispanics $6,325, and black folks $5,677?"

"For real?"

"What's your source material, nigger?"

"The Pew Research Center."

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. Pops politely asked the manager to dim the lights. I switched on the overhead projector, slid a transparency over the glass, and together we craned our necks toward the ceiling, where a bar graph titled "Income Disparity as Determined by Race" hovered overhead like some dark, damning, statistical cumulonimbus cloud threatening to rain on our collective parades.

"I was wondering what that li'l nigger was doing in a donut shop with a damn overhead projector.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Yes, being black is a full-time job: sometimes you are invisible, other times you are hyper-visible," he says. "Sometimes you are welcome, other times you are not. The thermostat is always moving and you have to keep adapting to find some comfort level. Richard Pryor used to talk about going to Africa and people there telling him he was white. Even though he was black, he just wasn't black enough.

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.

I'm convinced that Nabokov wrote his novels around words like agglutinate, siliceous, gardyloo, ophidian, triskelions. That he took an ESL course at a local night school and the teacher wrote those words on the blackboard and said, "Today's assignment is to take these words and use them in a first novel the New York Times will call 'Riveting, truly a classic for the ages.

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.

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.

At least Lars was curious about the appeal of jazz to black folk; for most observers, such ponderation is akin to contemplating why gorillas like bananas. The attractiveness of jazz to the nonblack is well documented in publicly funded documentaries where experts speak of jazz in the past tense. They look authoritatively into the camera and ingratiate themselves with the Man by saying things like, "White people were hearing something in jazz that says something deeply about their experience. I'm not sure that it would have been this way if we were not a country of immigrants ... so many people felt kind of displaced ... I think that was part of its amazing appeal, was how it spoke to feeling out of sort and out of joint and maladjusted."
What hogwash. Does my fondness for classical music make me well adjusted? Besides, people who are really fucked up don't turn to jazz; they turn to heroin, opium, whiskey, and Vonnegut.

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.

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.

I'm so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren't there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That's why black literature sucks!

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

When she finished, the white teacher, his face streaked with tears, tapped his boss on the shoulder, and like a television cop handing in his badge and gun, he solemnly removed the shiny new Teach for America button fastened to his sweater vest, placed it in Charisma's palm, and walked off into the squall.

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.

the "bystander effect": the more people around to provide help, the less likely one is to receive help. Dad hypothesized that this didn't apply to black people, a loving race whose very survival has been dependent on helping one another in times of need. So he made me stand on the busiest intersection in the neighborhood, dollar bills bursting from my pockets, the latest and shiniest electronic gadgetry jammed into my ear canals, a hip-hop heavy gold chain hanging from my neck, and, inexplicably, a set of custom-made carpeted Honda Civic floor mats draped over my forearm like a waiter's towel, and as tears streamed from my eyes, my own father mugged me. He

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.

[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[.]

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.

I missed my father driving us back from the Pomona State Fair, elbowing me awake, the Dodger postgame on the radio as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes just in time to see that sign, DICKENS-NEXT EXIT, and know I was home. Shit, I missed that sign. And what are cities really, besides signs and arbitrary boundaries?

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

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.

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

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.

Sometimes just making yourself at home is revolutionary.

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.

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.

This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I've never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks.

Sitting here on the steps of the Supreme Court smoking weed, under the "Equal Justice Under Law" motto, staring into the stars, I've finally figured out what's wrong with Washington, D.C. It's that all the buildings are more or less the same height and there's absolutely no skyline, save for the Washington Monument touching the night sky like a giant middle finger to the world.

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

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

I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six. It's a maxim, an oft-repeated rap lyric, a last-ditch rock and hard place algorithm that on the surface is about faith in the system but in reality means shoot first, put your trust in the public defender, and be thankful you still have your health. I

The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks's bus."

"Who lost Rosa Parks's bus?"

"White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That's what my sister says, anyway."

"I don't know."

Cuz took two deep swallows of gin. "What you mean, 'You don't know'? You think that after Rosa Parks bitch-slapped white America, some white rednecks going to go out of their way to save the original bus? That'd be like the Celtics hanging Magic Johnson's jersey in the rafters of the Boston Garden. No fucking way.

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

My litmus test of compatibility is 'Tom Cruise.' I hate people who hate Tom Cruise, cultural automatons who at the mention of his name reflexively bridle and say the diminutive thespian and Theta level Scientoligist is 'crazy' and 'a terrible actor'. They hate him because he's easy to hate. They think that despising Tom Cruise's lack of personality and supposed lack of talent is somehow a blow against the bland American Anschluss of the rest of the planet. Tom Cruise may indeed be the Christopher Columbus of the twentieth century, sent off by the kings of Hollywood to prove the new world of International Box Office isn't flat and to find a direct route into the Asian market, but the decline of everything isn't his fault; he's just a cinematic explorer and a damn fine actor. And hating him doesn't make you seditious- it makes you complicit.

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

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.

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

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

Our teacher says we're supposed to be colorblind. That's hard to do if you can see color, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I'd say so, but I think your teacher means don't make any assumptions based on color."

"Cross on the green and not in between.

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.

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.

During social studies, otherwise known as Dad's cirriculum as the Ways and Means of the Indefatigable White People, my father used to warn me about listening to rap or the blues with Caucasian strangers. And as I got older, I'd be admonished not to play Monopoly, drink more than two beers, or smoke weed with them either. For such activities can breed a false sense of familiarity . And nothing, from a hungry jungle cat to the African ferryboat, is more dangerous than a white person on what they think is familiar ground.

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

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

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.

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

Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he'd never heard a patient of color talk of needing "closure." They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they've achieved is erasure.

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.

Look, dude, you've sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the Dj up as the executive, the legislative, and judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I've heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights.

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