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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
Used
John
Like
Wrote
Expected
Machines
Anomaly
Writers
Anomalies
Days
Pulp
Everybody
Context
Someone
Literary

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The half-life of love is forever.
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My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place.
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Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.
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My art feels like it's real disobedient. I can fill notebooks with observations and maybe they find their way into the work unconsciously, which is great. I've never been able to directly plug, like to take a little snip that I've picked up on the street and transfer it into a story. I don't know what's wrong, but it never works that way.
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Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.
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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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In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.
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Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.
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Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
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I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.
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You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.
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Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.
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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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She's applying her lipstick I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.
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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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Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
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You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
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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.
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Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
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