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Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in.

Junot Diaz

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Junot Diaz
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Artists
Cheerleader
Culture
Hurtful
Artist
Tourism
Expose
Discuss
Contradictory
Cheerleaders
Boards
Silenced
Heads
Problematic

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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The U.S. that I had imagined was nowhere near as crazy and as incredibly damaging and brutal and indifferent as the U.S. that we're currently living in. I thought I was being transgressive, apocalyptic, an out-there person. And then reality lapped me, it just lapped me.
Junot Diaz
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Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for.
Junot Diaz
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You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.
Junot Diaz
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You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.
Junot Diaz
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I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.
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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Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.
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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Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.
Junot Diaz
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The half-life of love is forever.
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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I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.
Junot Diaz
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I always think about myself as a writer that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.
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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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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For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.
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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When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage when I smile folks check their wallets.
Junot Diaz
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She's applying her lipstick I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.
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