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Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
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
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More quotes by Junot Diaz
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
Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.
Junot Diaz
I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity. It's like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves.
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
You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
Junot Diaz
I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.
Junot Diaz
Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in.
Junot Diaz
but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
Junot Diaz
'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.
Junot Diaz
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
Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.
Junot Diaz
We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.
Junot Diaz
I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
Junot Diaz
...sometimes a start is all we ever get.
Junot Diaz
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
Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.
Junot Diaz
Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known.
Junot Diaz
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
Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
Junot Diaz
This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is.
Junot Diaz
