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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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Junot Diaz
Age: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Thought
Genre
Wanted
Decide
Book
Connected
Partially
Always
Neither
Hybrid
Reader
Belonged
Novel
Drown
Story
Collection
Stories
Collections

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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I find reading to be a delight, a source of comfort, a way to explore.
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I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity. It's like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves.
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When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.
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She's applying her lipstick I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.
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Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable.
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The half-life of love is forever.
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.
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In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.
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'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.
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I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
Junot Diaz
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Now people like Susan Sarandon are noticing that people of color live this way?! This is the way I've always lived! What's happened is that it has now reached a level of national discourse where it's on the table. But they've never minded that we were treated like this off-stage.
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You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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What a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are).
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In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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We can speculate. Last time I checked, the future doesn't take my advice.
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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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New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
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