Quote

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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Junot Diaz
Age: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Hand
Though
White
Running
Runs
Hands
Africa
Even
Easily
Thing
Hair
Like
Boys

More quotes by 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.
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In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
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Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
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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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Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.
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You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.
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Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
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I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
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Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.
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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.
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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 spent my entire childhood feeling like a freak because I liked to read. It's just like, Eh, no one else likes to read but me I must be crazy!
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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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Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
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I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.
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I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.
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I've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing.
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A person doesn't mourn forever.
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Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.
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As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.
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