Paul Beatty Quotes

Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.

All stories are true," Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean.

Everything is true, and nothing is true!

There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

Whoever says he is starting from a given in nature may be right, and so is he who says he is starting from nothing!

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

We're always just telling stories, and stories are always just approximations of the truth. It's never the truth exactly.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.

Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

In every truth, the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is onesided.

Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.' 'Will you be all right?' 'I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too.

For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.

Poets are like proverbs: you can always find one to contradict another.

A thing is a thing, not what is said of a thing

I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.

There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

Watt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.