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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
Freshman
Calling
Became
Read
Rutgers
Wanted
Toni
Writing
Sandra
Morrison
Clicked

More quotes by 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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I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That's what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma- she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you.
Junot Diaz
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The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.
Junot Diaz
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I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
Junot Diaz
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Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.
Junot Diaz
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New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
Junot Diaz
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You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
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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Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
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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but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
Junot Diaz
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I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve.
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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The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
Junot Diaz