Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've written a little bit in Germany.
I've also never written anything really in LA.
I'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].
I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.
I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
Maybe I'm just sensitive to that person who's on the outside.
I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe.
I don't write to put it in a drawer, I hope that people see it.
It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
The Sellout is about friends and relatives who have touched me in real ways.
My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
I can't say that I love writing, but I do love the satisfaction that it gives me.
My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate."
There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.
All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.
I don't know exactly what a black Chinese restaurant would be, but I would sure love to see one.
If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.
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.
People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.
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.
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.
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.
Contradictions make people feel off. They'll say, "Hey, you just said this and now this person is doing that, how is that possible?"
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
If all the students who slept through lectures were laid end to end, they'd all be a lot more comfortable. If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
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."
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.
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 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.