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Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.
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
Change
Sometimes
Even
Trying
Work
Attempting
Anxiety
Inspirational
More quotes by Junot Diaz
Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.
Junot Diaz
It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
Junot Diaz
When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage when I smile folks check their wallets.
Junot Diaz
Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.
Junot Diaz
I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.
Junot Diaz
Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.
Junot Diaz
She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.
Junot Diaz
I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
Junot Diaz
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
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
I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.
Junot Diaz
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
I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.
Junot Diaz
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.
Junot Diaz
As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.
Junot Diaz
Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.
Junot Diaz
The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.
Junot Diaz
It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.
Junot Diaz
Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for.
Junot Diaz
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
