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There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.

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
Real
Memoir
Really
Level
Fiction
Levels
Whether
Certain
Today
Done
Scepticism

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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We can speculate. Last time I checked, the future doesn't take my advice.
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Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.
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As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.
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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.
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It took me sixteen years to write.
Junot Diaz
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Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.
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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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.
Junot Diaz
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Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
Junot Diaz
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I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films.
Junot Diaz
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'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.
Junot Diaz
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The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.
Junot Diaz
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My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.
Junot Diaz
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She had reason to doubt him he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.
Junot Diaz
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I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.
Junot Diaz
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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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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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...sometimes a start is all we ever get.
Junot Diaz
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As an artist you're on a journey of discovery and sometimes that journey takes a long time, doesn't subscribe to [a] train schedule, to the punch-clock. And I need to read a lot to make my pages happen.
Junot Diaz
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Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.
Junot Diaz