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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.

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
Wanted
Toni
Writing
Sandra
Morrison
Clicked
Freshman
Calling
Became
Read
Rutgers

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.
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I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
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Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
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I find reading to be a delight, a source of comfort, a way to explore.
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Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.
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Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.
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Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
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We know story collections end when they end, as well - the pages serving as a countdown - but nevertheless the standard story anthology hews closer to what makes being human so hard: it reminds you with each story how quickly everything we are, everything we call our lives can change, can be upended, can disappear. Never to return.
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I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
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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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It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
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God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.
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Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.
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I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.
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Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
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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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This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.
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We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.
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Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.
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Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.
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