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Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
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
Names
Lost
Art
Long
Fundamentally
Time
Requires
Worth
Name
More quotes by Junot Diaz
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
I prefer the 1950s where people were like, I'm a white supremacist, and that's who I am. Now people want to burn a cross on your lawn and call themselves not racists.
Junot Diaz
For me, the battle isn't Hillary [Clinton] vs. [Bernie] Sanders. And I understand that for some people that's the battle. But for me, more than anything, it's stopping a Republican president.
Junot Diaz
I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Junot Diaz
You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you?
Junot Diaz
For my first three books the setting (or place if you will) has always been a given - N.J. and the Dominican Republic and some N.Y.C. - so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first.
Junot Diaz
The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.
Junot Diaz
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
Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
Junot Diaz
That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
Junot Diaz
I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.
Junot Diaz
Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.
Junot Diaz
In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
Junot Diaz
I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
Junot Diaz
Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.
Junot Diaz
A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve.
Junot Diaz
People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.
Junot Diaz
You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.
Junot Diaz
I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.
Junot Diaz
In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.
Junot Diaz
