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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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Junot Diaz
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Humans
Monster
Make
Monsters
Cultural
Reflection
Deny
Level
Levels
Human

More quotes by 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.
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It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.
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Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
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My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.
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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.
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Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
Junot Diaz
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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
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I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.
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.
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I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.
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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.
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The idea that America has cornered the market on anti-immigration is ridiculous. It's a global phenomenon.
Junot Diaz
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When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.
Junot Diaz
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She had reason to doubt him he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.
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This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.
Junot Diaz
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Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.
Junot Diaz
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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
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For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.
Junot Diaz
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Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
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Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.
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