Top 50 Paul Beatty Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

Featured in: Quotes About New York

2. “If all the world’s a stage, I want to operate the trap door.”

— Paul Beatty

3. “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.”

— Paul Beatty

4. “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

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. “One if by Land Cruiser. Two if by C-class Mercedes. The bougies are coming! The bougies are coming!”

— Paul Beatty

7. “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.”

— Paul Beatty

8. “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.”

— Paul Beatty

9. “Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.”

— Paul Beatty

10. “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

11. “Semper Fi, Semper Funky.”

— Paul Beatty

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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.”

— Paul Beatty

16. “Foy was no Tree of Knowledge, at most he was a Bush of Opinion.”

— Paul Beatty

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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”?”

— Paul Beatty

21. “Sometimes just making yourself at home is revolutionary.”

— Paul Beatty

22. “Listing hard to the right like a drunken seaman with an inner ear infection.”

— Paul Beatty

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

— Paul Beatty

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

— Paul Beatty

25. “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

26. “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

27. “All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It’s so ancient.”

— Paul Beatty

28. “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

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

— Paul Beatty

30. “I sit in a thickly padded char that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks.”

— Paul Beatty

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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’.”

— Paul Beatty

34. “I can’t say that I love writing, but I do love the satisfaction that it gives me.”

— Paul Beatty

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

— Paul Beatty

36. “That there’s something about the craziness that he had to go through that’s kept me relatively sane.”

— Paul Beatty

37. “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

38. “If he was indeed an “autodidact,” there’s no doubt he had the world’s shittiest teacher.”

— Paul Beatty

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Your daddy doesn’t know his assonance from his elegy! And he calls himself a poet.”

— 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. “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.”

— Paul Beatty

44. “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

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

— Paul Beatty

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Founded in 1868, Dickens, like most California towns except for Irvine, which was established as a breeding ground for stupid, fat, ugly, white Republicans and the chihuahuas and East Asian refugees who love them, started out as an agrarian community.”

— Paul Beatty

49. “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

50. “Your dad used to think I was bipolar, but what I really am is by myself.”

— Paul Beatty