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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

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.
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I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
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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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Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.
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You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
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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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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.
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What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.
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The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.
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A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve.
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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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In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
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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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You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That's what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma- she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you.
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What a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are).
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The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
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You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.
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You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.
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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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Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known.
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