Quotes & Sayings About Beatty

Yes, being black is a full-time job: sometimes you are invisible, other times you are hyper-visible," he says. "Sometimes you are welcome, other times you are not. The thermostat is always moving and you have to keep adapting to find some comfort level. Richard Pryor used to talk about going to Africa and people there telling him he was white. Even though he was black, he just wasn't black enough. — Paul Beatty

You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play. — Warren Beatty

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

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

If there is reincarnation, I'd like to come back as Warren Beatty's fingertips. — Woody Allen

He wants to believe that Shakespeare wrote all those books, that Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves and the United States fought World War II to rescue the Jews and keep the world safe for democracy, that Jesus and the double feature are coming back. But I'm no Panglossian American. — Paul Beatty

It's corny, but I think poems are echoes of the voices in your head and from your past. Your sisters, your father, your ancestors taking to you and through you. Some of it is primal, some of it is hallucinatory bullshit. That madness those boys rapping ain't nothing but urban folklore. They retelling stories passed down from chicken coop to apartment stoop to Ford coupe. Hear that rhyme, boy. Shit, I could get down and rap if I had to. MC Big Mama Osteoporosis in the house. — Paul Beatty

...true freedom is having the right to be a slave. — Paul Beatty

it is not an easy matter to change suddenly from the butterfly to the busy bee. — Laura Beatty

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

To say that people would cease to come to California if they would have to pay more taxes is to underestimate the advantages of being in California - mightily. — Warren Beatty

Most couples have songs they call their own. We had books. Authors. Artists. Silent movies. — Paul Beatty

For the kids at Chaff, the annual Career Day, held about two weeks before the summer break, was enough to make most of them at contemplate career suicide before they'd even taken an aptitude test or a written resume. Held outdoors on the schoolyard blacktop, the assemblage of coal miners, driving-range golf-ball retrievers, basket weavers, ditch diggers, book-binders, traumatized fire-fighters, and the world's last astronaut never does much to inspire. — Paul Beatty

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

[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[.] — Paul Beatty

My litmus test of compatibility is 'Tom Cruise.' I hate people who hate Tom Cruise, cultural automatons who at the mention of his name reflexively bridle and say the diminutive thespian and Theta level Scientoligist is 'crazy' and 'a terrible actor'. They hate him because he's easy to hate. They think that despising Tom Cruise's lack of personality and supposed lack of talent is somehow a blow against the bland American Anschluss of the rest of the planet. Tom Cruise may indeed be the Christopher Columbus of the twentieth century, sent off by the kings of Hollywood to prove the new world of International Box Office isn't flat and to find a direct route into the Asian market, but the decline of everything isn't his fault; he's just a cinematic explorer and a damn fine actor. And hating him doesn't make you seditious- it makes you complicit. — Paul Beatty

I love movies. I adore movies. I grew up on Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood and Warren Beatty. The list goes on. Spencer Tracy. I wanted to be in movies. — Pierce Brosnan

When I saw Arnold say that he didn't need a union, because people in his position don't need it, I thought, this is a very naive way to present yourself. It's also kinda dumb about making movies. It doesn't realize how the union movement even helps the star. — Warren Beatty

The Beatties were always arguing, it gave them an interest in life ... — Elspeth Huxley

Being here allows me to make the case that not all aging, narcissistic movie actors whose children could be mistaken for their grandchildren necessarily act with the same motivation. — Warren Beatty

It's very clear you have to engage the public and say: You have to vote no on 74, no on 75, no on 76, no on 77. Those are the issues that Arnold pushing. And those are reactionary, Republican initiatives. — Warren Beatty

My only complaints are two:
that I didn't make myself ready
for you sooner in life, that
I can't give you better,
Love you more. — Jan Beatty

I have a day job. I can make movies when I want to. — Warren Beatty

I was born just barely south of the Mason Dixon line. — Ned Beatty

There are some people whom you have in life who have the capacity for real, passionate commitment to something, and sometimes you may be passionately committed to the same thing. — Warren Beatty

By that time this society is going to be completely different for one thing. Your own son or your own son's son is not going to have the needs for money that you feel you have now. The society itself will be less dependent on money and currency to get along. — Warren Beatty

You'd rather have nothing than settle for less. — Warren Beatty

To denigrate the union movement in this way is to denigrate the right and the ability of people who are not rich to organize and to accomplish things together. — Warren Beatty

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

Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh?' ... There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm. — Ray Bradbury

I only really work when I want to. — Ned Beatty

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

I believe if a private citizen is able to affect public opinion in a constructive way he doesn't have to be an elected public servant to perform a public service. — Warren Beatty

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

Arnold has had his spokesman call me a crackpot. That was a mistake. — Warren Beatty

Look at the list of liberals who are active in politics, if not running. Barbra Streisand, Sean Penn, Warren Beatty, Springsteen, Spielberg ... And then you look at the conservatives, it's like Chuck Norris, Bo Derek and the Gatlin Brothers. I don't know if being liberal makes you more right, but it does seem like it makes you more talented. — Bill Maher

Because I knew that racist Negro Archetypes, like Bebe's Kids, don't die. They multiply. — Paul Beatty

She'd always had a hankering for sitting quietly in dark, confined spaces. — Robert Beatty

the "bystander effect": the more people around to provide help, the less likely one is to receive help. Dad hypothesized that this didn't apply to black people, a loving race whose very survival has been dependent on helping one another in times of need. So he made me stand on the busiest intersection in the neighborhood, dollar bills bursting from my pockets, the latest and shiniest electronic gadgetry jammed into my ear canals, a hip-hop heavy gold chain hanging from my neck, and, inexplicably, a set of custom-made carpeted Honda Civic floor mats draped over my forearm like a waiter's towel, and as tears streamed from my eyes, my own father mugged me. He — Paul Beatty

This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I've never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks. — Paul Beatty

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

My mother and my father were teachers. My grandmother and my grandfather were teachers. This is something I really know about. Even when I was a kid, it was a profession my father couldn't stay in, because he couldn't make enough money. — Warren Beatty

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). — Paul Beatty

Today a Scot is leading a British army in France [Field Marshall Douglas Haig], another is commanding the British Grand Fleet at sea [Admiral David Beatty], while a third directs the Imperial General Staff at home [Sir William Roberton]. The Lord Chancellor is a Scot [Viscount Finlay]; so are the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary [Bonar Law and Arthur Balfour]. The Prime Minister is a Welshman [David Lloyd George], and the First Lord of the Admiralty is an Irishman [Lord Carson]. Yet no one has ever brought in a bill to give home rule to England! — John Hay Beith

When I produce a movie - and I've produced a number of movies, unlike Arnold - yes, I'm frustrated when the union says you can't do this, you can't work past that hour, you've got to break for lunch. But ultimately, they're right. What they do is for everyone's benefit. — Warren Beatty

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"? After a long pause, I finally faced the bench and said, "Your Honor, I plead human. — Paul Beatty

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

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. — Paul Beatty

For me, the highest level of sexual excitement is in a monogamous relationship. — Warren Beatty

For those looking to find the thing that you've lost, the decision of where to place your handbill is one of the toughest you'll ever make in life. — Paul Beatty

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

Bad movies: they can be tatty classics of crazed ineptitude, like Edward D. Wood's 'Glen or Glenda' and 'Plan 9 from Outer Space,' or big-budget misfires like the 1987 'Ishtar,' a would-be comedy that sent Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman on a Hope-Crosby Road to Dystopia. — Richard Corliss

I believe that DVD is that which gives some hope to retaining some content in movies that will appeal to an older audience or the more sophisticated audience or the audience that doesn't need or desire to see a movie on a Friday night. — Warren Beatty

Then his fingers trembled on her ankle - tightened around her foot. His head shifted, turning toward her. With a growl, she crashed the poker down onto his head. His hand jerked. A gurgling noise arose, not from his throat but from his chest, from deep down, as if he were fighting for something. Struggling. His eyes shifted toward her. Joan raised the poker again. The gurgling stopped - not abruptly but in a final, lingering, prolonged, exhalation of breath. His lungs gradually expelled every last atom of oxygen. — Cate Campbell Beatty

Government is not show business. — Warren Beatty

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

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

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

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. — Paul Beatty

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

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

I'll tell you," said Beatty, smiling at his cards. "That made you for a little while a drunkard. Read a few lines and off you go over the cliff. Bang, you're ready to blow up the world, chop off heads, knock down women and children, destroy authority. I know. I've been through it all. — Ray Bradbury

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. — Paul Beatty

Never go into the deep parts of the forest, for there are many dangers there, both dark and bright, and they will ensnare your soul. — Robert Beatty

Movies are fun, but they're not a cure for cancer. — Warren Beatty

And because they had mass, they became simpler," said Beatty. "Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?" "I think so." Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. "Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending." "Snap ending." Mildred nodded. "Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. — Ray Bradbury

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient. — Paul Beatty

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. — Paul Beatty

When you mutilate movies for mass media, you tamper with the hearts and minds of America. — Warren Beatty

Fuck you, Mr. Beatty! — Caris O'Malley

Well I would never say to anybody that Warren Beatty got fired, but uh, I think he and Quentin fell out of love, and I think Warren told Quentin to hire me for the film. — David Carradine

My wife always says that I will be stuck with this forever: I am the difficult one. With Jack Nicholson they always said it was drugs. Warren Beatty is supposed to have screwed everything that jumped off the curve. I'll tell you, in reality a few of us had as many girls as Warren. — Dustin Hoffman

Always thank your nurse. Sometimes they're the only one between you and a hearse. — Warren Beatty

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

He was less like a tree of knowledge and more like a bush of opinions." From the book "The Sellout — Paul Beatty

If he was indeed an "autodidact," there's no doubt he had the world's shittiest teacher. — Paul Beatty

That the city would return to being the thriving white suburb of his youth. Cars with tail fins. Straw hats and sock hops. Episcopalians and ice cream socials. It would be the opposite of white flight, he said. "The Ku Klux influx." But when I'd ask him how, he'd just shrug and, like a conservative senator without any ideas, filibuster me with unrelated stories about the good ol' days. — Paul Beatty

Warren Beatty has always acted like a Movie Star even when no one knew who he was. — Dwayne Hickman

It was not that donors had no loyalty to each other, but they were not ashamed to betray a fellow donor. In its wisdom the Alliance promulgated the moral rules - the main one being one's duty to the Alliance. The Alliance was sacred - all else secondary. But not all donors - or citizens - bought into that. Many knew in their hearts there was more to life. — Cate Campbell Beatty

Her hand accidentally brushed up against his chest. She froze. His breathing remained steady and regular. He had not awoken. She was about to pull her hand away, then stopped. Never had she touched a man's chest. She waited a moment. His breathing was still constant, still regular. He was still asleep. Flattening her palm against his chest, she felt the tautness of his muscles. She moved her hand, slowly, tremulously, down his chest and across his stomach, feeling the firmness of his skin and his strong physique. He seized her hand, pushed it away, and turned his back to her. — Cate Campbell Beatty

The meetings consisted mostly of the members who showed up every other week arguing with the ones who came every other month about what exactly "bimonthly" means. I — Paul Beatty

And she knew that her fate wasn't set by how or where she was born, but the decisions she made and the battles she fought. It didn't matter if she had eight toes or ten, amber eyes or blue. What mattered was what she set out to do. — Robert Beatty

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

I'm old, I'm young, I'm intelligent, I'm stupid. My tide goes in and out. — Warren Beatty

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

People eat the shit you shovel them. — Paul Beatty

I don't think you should talk while the movie was going on and say, 'Oh, look at that - look how smart I was' or 'What a brilliant shot that is!' I don't believe in that. — Warren Beatty

Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it's fear. — Paul Beatty

Basically the tax reform ideas are to clean up the tax system and to eliminate the loopholes that only very few make use of, to eliminate the possibility of people making millions of dollars every year and not paying any tax at all through oil depletion allowances and things like that. — Warren Beatty

During the night a fine, delicate summer rain had washed the plains, leaving the morning sky crisp and clean. The sun shone warm - soon to bake the earth dry. It cast a purple haze across the plain - like a great, dark topaz. In the trees the birds sang, while the squirrels jumped from branch to branch in seeming good will, belying the expected tension of the coming days. — Cate Campbell Beatty

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

There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today. — Warren Beatty

I was friends with President Ronald Reagan and he once said to me, 'I don't know how anybody can serve in public office without being an actor.' — Warren Beatty

In a way, I'd rather ride down the street on a camel than give what is sometimes called an in-depth interview. I'd rather ride down the street on a camel nude. In a snowstorm. Backwards. — Warren Beatty

Look, dude, you've sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the Dj up as the executive, the legislative, and judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I've heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights. — Paul Beatty

If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door. — Paul Beatty

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

Marriage requires a special talent, like acting. Monogamy requires genius. — Warren 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. — Paul Beatty

And if an increasingly pluralistic America ever decides to commission a new motto, I'm open for business, because I've got a better one than E pluribus unum. Tu dormis, tu perdis ... You snooze, you lose. — Paul Beatty