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The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.

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
Unpublished
Imperfection
Published
Tolerance
Difference
Writer
Differences

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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I find reading to be a delight, a source of comfort, a way to explore.
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I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.
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The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
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[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.
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Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.
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In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.
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Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
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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.
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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.
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You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.
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You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you?
Junot Diaz
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I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
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...sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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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Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.
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I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
Junot Diaz
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There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.
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.
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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