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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: 56
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

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I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
Junot Diaz
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- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. - But your yourself sucks! - It is, lamentably, all I have.
Junot Diaz
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Privilege does not operate without silence.
Junot Diaz
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I think what happened to me was that I was always being taught to look, but one day I started to see. And it was because a lot of women in my life were refusing just to be looked at, to be this passive figure.
Junot Diaz
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The half-life of love is forever.
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I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.
Junot Diaz
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You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.
Junot Diaz
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It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
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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If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original.
Junot Diaz
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Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.
Junot Diaz
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People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.
Junot Diaz
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I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Junot Diaz
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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
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Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.
Junot Diaz
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I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.
Junot Diaz
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You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.
Junot Diaz
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I've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing.
Junot Diaz
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What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.
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