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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.

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
Couldn
Dies
Read
Write
Writing
Always
Would
Writers

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What a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are).
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That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
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Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known.
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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.
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Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
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My father was a trigamist he supported three families. We were never not poor.
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Privilege does not operate without silence.
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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 sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.
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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.
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Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.
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John Carter was also one of our first recognizable superhumans and there is little doubt that his extraordinary physical feats inspired Superman's creators. Remember: before Superman could fly or turn back time, he was nothing less than an earthbound crime-fighting John Carter in tights.
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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.
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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!
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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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I find reading to be a delight, a source of comfort, a way to explore.
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As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.
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I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
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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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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.
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