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My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.

Junot Diaz

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Junot Diaz
Age: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Made
African
Roots
Exist
Today
Reason

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.
Junot Diaz
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Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.
Junot Diaz
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And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.
Junot Diaz
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It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.
Junot Diaz
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I really am a believer that 99.99% of all the stories we need, not only as artists but as human beings, not only as writers but as readers, haven't been written yet. Certainly haven't been published yet.
Junot Diaz
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The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.
Junot Diaz
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'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.
Junot Diaz
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When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.
Junot Diaz
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I think men spend so much time passing for being men. There's a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd. But it was the thing we weren't saying, that people were afraid to say, like, Yo, what we do is nerdy by definition.
Junot Diaz
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...one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.
Junot Diaz
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Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
Junot Diaz
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...sometimes a start is all we ever get.
Junot Diaz
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I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy.
Junot Diaz
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'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.
Junot Diaz
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Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.
Junot Diaz
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I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
Junot Diaz
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To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.
Junot Diaz
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God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.
Junot Diaz
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I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration. We fundamentally have been a culture that's been put together from the explosions of other cultures. But it's hard for us to see. We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is.
Junot Diaz
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I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.
Junot Diaz