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I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.

Junot Diaz

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Junot Diaz
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Didn
Kids
Enough
Dominican
Category
Categories
Neither
Safe
Black

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People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.
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That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
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She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.
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You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
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In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
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New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
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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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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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'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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The idea that America has cornered the market on anti-immigration is ridiculous. It's a global phenomenon.
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When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.
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I came up under [Ronald] Reagan and under [George] Bush, and what are we to do now? We are here to fight. People can run off all they want. But for me, [Donald] Trump is already in the Dominican Republic.
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Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.
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Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.
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When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.
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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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Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.
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The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
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I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
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