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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
Trot
Harvard
Dies
Tell
Someone
Always
Would

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It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.
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In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.
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My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.
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Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
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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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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.
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A young person, or someone who's writing in a different way - in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it's good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.
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Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable.
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I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy.
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Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
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Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.
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I was in fact pretty much - by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV - encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men.
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I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
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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.
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She had reason to doubt him he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.
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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.
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Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.
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In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work.
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She's applying her lipstick I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.
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...sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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