Quotes from Paul Beatty

the reason they don't permit cameras has nothing to do with maintaining decorum and dignity. It's to protect the country from seeing what's underneath Plymouth Rock. Because the 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, and what did Justice Potter once say about obscenity? I know it when I see it.

The only people discussing "race" with any insight and courage are loud middle-aged white men who romanticize the Kennedys and Motown, well-read open-minded white kids like the tie-dyed familiar sitting next to me in the Free Tibet and Boba Fett T-shirt, a few freelance journalists in Detroit, and the American hikikomori who sit in their basements pounding away at their keyboards composing measured and well-thought-out responses to the endless torrent of racist online commentary.

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.

This whole city's a Freudian slip of the tongue, a concrete hard-on for America's deeds and misdeeds. Slavery? Manifest Destiny? Laverne & Shirley? Standing by idly while Germany tried to kill every Jew in Europe? Why some of my best friends are the Museum of African Art, the Holocaust Museum, the Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And furthermore, I'll have you know, my sister's daughter is married to an orangutan.

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.

And this country, the latent hight school homosexual that it is, the mulatto passing for white that it is, the Neanderthal incessantly plucking its unibrow that it is, needs people like him. It needs somebody to throw baseballs at, to fag-bash, to nigger-stomp, to invade, to embargo. Anything that, like baseball, keeps a country that's constantly preening in the mirror from actually looking in the mirror and remembering where the bodies are buried.

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"?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes just making yourself at home is revolutionary.

Feigned or not, sometimes I'm jealous of Hominy's oblivousness, because he, unlike America, has turned the page. That's the problem with history, we like to think of 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.

Money talks, bullshit walks Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Pecunia sermo, somnium ambulo.

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

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

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

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.

If Jean Valjean had me representing him," he likes to say, "then Les Misérables would've only been six pages long. Dismissed—Loaf of Bread Pilfery.

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[.]

Semper Fi, Semper Funky

What goes around, comes around Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Quod circumvehitur, revehitur.

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).