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When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage when I smile folks check their wallets.
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
Folks
Smile
Marriage
Hand
Niggers
Asks
Wallets
Hands
Smiles
Check
Checks
More quotes by Junot Diaz
Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
Junot Diaz
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!
Junot Diaz
In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.
Junot Diaz
Part of it is eight years of a black president, and white America still lost their [minds] about that. Part of it is a Republican politics of vicious, vicious partisan [stuff] that has completely poisoned what we would call the political rhetorical sphere. All of these things come together in a perfect storm.
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
Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
Junot Diaz
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.
Junot Diaz
I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
Junot Diaz
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
You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
Junot Diaz
but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
Junot Diaz
I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.
Junot Diaz
The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.
Junot Diaz
Katrina was one of those things that rips the clothes off of the guy who keeps saying he's a saint, and underneath you see that he's a monster.
Junot Diaz
It took me sixteen years to write.
Junot Diaz
'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.
Junot Diaz
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.
Junot Diaz
Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.
Junot Diaz
The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.
Junot Diaz
Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
Junot Diaz
