Quotes from Paul Beatty

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.

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.

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

Act your age, not your shoe size Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Factio vestri aevum, non vestri calceus amplitudo.

Tu dormis, tu perdis Ã¢â'¬Â¦ You snooze, you lose.

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.

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.

Who was I kidding? I'm a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I'm not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I'm a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe.

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

I don't care if you're black, white, brown, yellow, red, green, or purple.' We've all said it. Posited as proof of our nonprejudicial ways, but if you painted any one of us purple or green, we'd be mad as hell.

the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolaño's prose. That the popularity of the spicy tuna roll and a black American president were to white male domination what the smallpox blankets were to Native American existence.