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I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.

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
Dominican
Jersey
Kids

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way.
Junot Diaz
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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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Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.
Junot Diaz
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I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
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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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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That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
Junot Diaz
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My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.
Junot Diaz
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Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
Junot Diaz
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The half-life of love is forever.
Junot Diaz
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Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.
Junot Diaz
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I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.
Junot Diaz
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'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.
Junot Diaz
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I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.
Junot Diaz
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It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)
Junot Diaz
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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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I feel most like myself... after I run - I go out for five miles every morning.
Junot Diaz
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If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves
Junot Diaz
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A person doesn't mourn forever.
Junot Diaz
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When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage when I smile folks check their wallets.
Junot Diaz