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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: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Categories
Neither
Safe
Black
Didn
Kids
Enough
Dominican
Category

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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I prefer the 1950s where people were like, I'm a white supremacist, and that's who I am. Now people want to burn a cross on your lawn and call themselves not racists.
Junot Diaz
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I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.
Junot Diaz
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You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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...sometimes a start is all we ever get.
Junot Diaz
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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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I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.
Junot Diaz
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I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films.
Junot Diaz
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I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.
Junot Diaz
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Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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It took me sixteen years to write.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.
Junot Diaz
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Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
Junot Diaz
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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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My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.
Junot Diaz
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God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.
Junot Diaz