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Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.

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
Certainly
Others
Nature
Diminishes
Also
Freedoms
Might
Diminish
Narrative
Genre
Increase

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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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.
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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.
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I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
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I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.
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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.
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Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
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Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number.
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I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
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Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.
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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.
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If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves
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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.
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The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.
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So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.
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Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
Junot Diaz
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You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it? There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It's just a matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.
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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
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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.
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It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)
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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.
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