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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
Novel
Drown
Story
Collection
Stories
Collections
Thought
Genre
Wanted
Decide
Book
Connected
Partially
Always
Neither
Hybrid
Reader
Belonged

More quotes by 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.
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I came up under [Ronald] Reagan and under [George] Bush, and what are we to do now? We are here to fight. People can run off all they want. But for me, [Donald] Trump is already in the Dominican Republic.
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I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
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Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.
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Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known.
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Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.
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The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.
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I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other time I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it's all wrong. I'm sorry, he'll say. I have to leave now.
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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.
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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.
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Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
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The world should always be concerned whenever a vast human rights violation occurs anywhere on the planet.
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My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.
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Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
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I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.
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Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.
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To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.
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[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.
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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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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.
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