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I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.

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
Always
Would
Trot
Harvard
Dies
Tell
Someone

More quotes by 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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Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.
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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Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.
Junot Diaz
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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
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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.
Junot Diaz
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I really am a believer that 99.99% of all the stories we need, not only as artists but as human beings, not only as writers but as readers, haven't been written yet. Certainly haven't been published yet.
Junot Diaz
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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
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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
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The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
Junot Diaz
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I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.
Junot Diaz
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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
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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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The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.
Junot Diaz
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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
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Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.
Junot Diaz
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There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.
Junot Diaz
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Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.
Junot Diaz
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but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
Junot Diaz
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...one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.
Junot Diaz