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It took me sixteen years to write.

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
Sixteen
Took
Write
Writing
Years

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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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.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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...sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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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I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.
Junot Diaz
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I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
Junot Diaz
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This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is.
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've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing.
Junot Diaz
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If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other's oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble.
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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Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory you won't see it often.
Junot Diaz
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Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.
Junot Diaz
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There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.
Junot Diaz
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Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.
Junot Diaz
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I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
Junot Diaz
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I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.
Junot Diaz
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John Carter was also one of our first recognizable superhumans and there is little doubt that his extraordinary physical feats inspired Superman's creators. Remember: before Superman could fly or turn back time, he was nothing less than an earthbound crime-fighting John Carter in tights.
Junot Diaz
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Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.
Junot Diaz
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We can speculate. Last time I checked, the future doesn't take my advice.
Junot Diaz