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We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.

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
Writing
Fiction
Tribe
Love
Saying
Insightful
Like
Wonderful
Tribes
People
Reading
Enjoying
Enjoy
Hanging
Doesn
Sell
Around
Sells
Many
Short
Economical

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The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.
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This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.
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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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In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work.
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I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
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People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.
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Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.
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If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other's oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble.
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As a Dominican man, you're socialized to be a playboy. You spend a lot of time being taught that women are important, but without the really positive framework of why. You figure out quickly it's because of culo (ass). But there is a sense that it's not that simple.
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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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For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.
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Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.
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I think what happened to me was that I was always being taught to look, but one day I started to see. And it was because a lot of women in my life were refusing just to be looked at, to be this passive figure.
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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.
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- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. - But your yourself sucks! - It is, lamentably, all I have.
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I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.
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If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original.
Junot Diaz
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I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.
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Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.
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Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.
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