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My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place.

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
Better
Shortcomings
Live
Acknowledge
Country
Privilege
Trying
Mistakes
Make
Greatest
Mistake
Responsibility
Place
Privileges

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.
Junot Diaz
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This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.
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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A young person, or someone who's writing in a different way - in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it's good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
Junot Diaz
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Privilege does not operate without silence.
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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I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished Drown was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.
Junot Diaz
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I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.
Junot Diaz
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I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
Junot Diaz
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...sometimes a start is all we ever get.
Junot Diaz
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I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
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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The world should always be concerned whenever a vast human rights violation occurs anywhere on the planet.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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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.
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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I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Junot Diaz
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We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way.
Junot Diaz