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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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Junot Diaz
Age: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Writers
Anomalies
Days
Pulp
Everybody
Context
Someone
Literary
Used
John
Like
Wrote
Expected
Machines
Anomaly
More quotes by Junot Diaz
You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you?
Junot Diaz
but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
Junot Diaz
This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.
Junot Diaz
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
The world should always be concerned whenever a vast human rights violation occurs anywhere on the planet.
Junot Diaz
I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.
Junot Diaz
This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is.
Junot Diaz
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
You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.
Junot Diaz
Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory you won't see it often.
Junot Diaz
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.
Junot Diaz
I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.
Junot Diaz
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.
Junot Diaz
She had reason to doubt him he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.
Junot Diaz
Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in.
Junot Diaz
Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.
Junot Diaz
It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.
Junot Diaz
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
I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration. We fundamentally have been a culture that's been put together from the explosions of other cultures. But it's hard for us to see. We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is.
Junot Diaz
I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.
Junot Diaz
