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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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Junot Diaz
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Oppression
Investment
Begin
Serious
Trouble
Practice
Oppressions
Possessive
Muscles

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
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You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.
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It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.
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New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number.
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She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.
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'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.
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Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
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Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.
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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.
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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.
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I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.
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The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
Junot Diaz
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We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.
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Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.
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