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I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.

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
Seem
Enjoy
Stories
Seems
Central
Absence
Telling

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.
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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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The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.
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I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.
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I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
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Part of it is eight years of a black president, and white America still lost their [minds] about that. Part of it is a Republican politics of vicious, vicious partisan [stuff] that has completely poisoned what we would call the political rhetorical sphere. All of these things come together in a perfect storm.
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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.
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She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.
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Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.
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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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Privilege does not operate without silence.
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.
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Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
Junot Diaz
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I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.
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.
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Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.
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I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
Junot Diaz
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The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.
Junot Diaz
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Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
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You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.
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