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For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.

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
Time
Believed
Worse
Mother
Wanted
Long

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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
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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.
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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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I've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing.
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Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
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New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
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So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.
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I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
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...one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.
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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.
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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.
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I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy.
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Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.
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I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.
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Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'
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I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.
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She's applying her lipstick I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.
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Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.
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Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.
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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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