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

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Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.
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My father was a trigamist he supported three families. We were never not poor.
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I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.
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I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
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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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Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.
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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?
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This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.
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Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.
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I think what happened to me was that I was always being taught to look, but one day I started to see. And it was because a lot of women in my life were refusing just to be looked at, to be this passive figure.
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As a Dominican man, you're socialized to be a playboy. You spend a lot of time being taught that women are important, but without the really positive framework of why. You figure out quickly it's because of culo (ass). But there is a sense that it's not that simple.
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The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.
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Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.
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Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.
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It took me sixteen years to write.
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I really am a believer that 99.99% of all the stories we need, not only as artists but as human beings, not only as writers but as readers, haven't been written yet. Certainly haven't been published yet.
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The U.S. that I had imagined was nowhere near as crazy and as incredibly damaging and brutal and indifferent as the U.S. that we're currently living in. I thought I was being transgressive, apocalyptic, an out-there person. And then reality lapped me, it just lapped me.
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Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'
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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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I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
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