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What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

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
Community
Tends
Hope
Opposite
Might
Opposites
Done
Solitude
Many
Writers
Great
Exactly
People
Produce
Joy
Desperation

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number.
Junot Diaz
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You can't be a human without seeing.
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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.
Junot Diaz
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It took me sixteen years to write.
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Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.
Junot Diaz
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I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
Junot Diaz
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I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.
Junot Diaz
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This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
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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If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.
Junot Diaz
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You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.
Junot Diaz
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Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz