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The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.

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
Listen
Culture
Art
Take
Whole
Always
Hurry
Time
Tells
Telling

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration. We fundamentally have been a culture that's been put together from the explosions of other cultures. But it's hard for us to see. We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is.
Junot Diaz
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Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory you won't see it often.
Junot Diaz
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Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
Junot Diaz
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I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.
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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So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.
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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Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.
Junot Diaz
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I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.
Junot Diaz
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The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.
Junot Diaz
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For me, the battle isn't Hillary [Clinton] vs. [Bernie] Sanders. And I understand that for some people that's the battle. But for me, more than anything, it's stopping a Republican president.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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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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This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.
Junot Diaz
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Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
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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The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.
Junot Diaz
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Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
Junot Diaz