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Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.

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
People
Thirds
Taking
Read
White
Two
Spanish
Book
Racism
Think
Sentences
Thinking
Third

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Junot Diaz
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The U.S. that I had imagined was nowhere near as crazy and as incredibly damaging and brutal and indifferent as the U.S. that we're currently living in. I thought I was being transgressive, apocalyptic, an out-there person. And then reality lapped me, it just lapped me.
Junot Diaz
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I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.
Junot Diaz
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You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
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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The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.
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 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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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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The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.
Junot Diaz
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I think men spend so much time passing for being men. There's a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd. But it was the thing we weren't saying, that people were afraid to say, like, Yo, what we do is nerdy by definition.
Junot Diaz
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Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number.
Junot Diaz
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I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
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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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
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Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.
Junot Diaz
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We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way.
Junot Diaz
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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.
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 came up under [Ronald] Reagan and under [George] Bush, and what are we to do now? We are here to fight. People can run off all they want. But for me, [Donald] Trump is already in the Dominican Republic.
Junot Diaz