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Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.

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
Speaking
Running
Persons
Person
Wells
Well
Always
Dictatorship
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More quotes by 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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In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
Junot Diaz
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Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.
Junot Diaz
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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
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I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.
Junot Diaz
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Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
Junot Diaz
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It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.
Junot Diaz
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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
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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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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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I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.
Junot Diaz
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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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Now people like Susan Sarandon are noticing that people of color live this way?! This is the way I've always lived! What's happened is that it has now reached a level of national discourse where it's on the table. But they've never minded that we were treated like this off-stage.
Junot Diaz
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Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory you won't see it often.
Junot Diaz
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My art feels like it's real disobedient. I can fill notebooks with observations and maybe they find their way into the work unconsciously, which is great. I've never been able to directly plug, like to take a little snip that I've picked up on the street and transfer it into a story. I don't know what's wrong, but it never works that way.
Junot Diaz
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The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are.
Junot Diaz
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Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
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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I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished Drown was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.
Junot Diaz
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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