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If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original.

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
Think
Thinking
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Consciously
Originals
Original
Cool
Different

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
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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'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.
Junot Diaz
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In fact, looking at the darkest sides of the United States has only made me appreciate the things that we do right, the things that we do beautifully. We are, for all of our mistakes and all of our crimes, a remarkable place.
Junot Diaz
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I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
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The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.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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You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.
Junot Diaz
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I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other time I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it's all wrong. I'm sorry, he'll say. I have to leave now.
Junot Diaz
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- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. - But your yourself sucks! - It is, lamentably, all I have.
Junot Diaz
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What a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are).
Junot Diaz
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As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.
Junot Diaz
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Now people like Susan Sarandon are noticing that people of color live this way?! This is the way I've always lived! What's happened is that it has now reached a level of national discourse where it's on the table. But they've never minded that we were treated like this off-stage.
Junot Diaz
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I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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My thing is every generation of Americans has to answer what we call the 'Superman Question.' Superman comes, lands in America. He's illegal. He's one of these kids. He's wrapped up in a red bullfighter's cape. And you've got to decide what we're gonna do with Superman.
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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Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.
Junot Diaz
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Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable.
Junot Diaz