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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.

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
Teach
Write
Helping
Also
Campuses
Different
Campus
Writing
Spent
Trying
Writers
Time
Conversation

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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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.
Junot Diaz
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Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
Junot Diaz
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She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.
Junot Diaz
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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
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My father was a trigamist he supported three families. We were never not poor.
Junot Diaz
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And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.
Junot Diaz
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I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.
Junot Diaz
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In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.
Junot Diaz
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The idea that America has cornered the market on anti-immigration is ridiculous. It's a global phenomenon.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.
Junot Diaz
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We know story collections end when they end, as well - the pages serving as a countdown - but nevertheless the standard story anthology hews closer to what makes being human so hard: it reminds you with each story how quickly everything we are, everything we call our lives can change, can be upended, can disappear. Never to return.
Junot Diaz
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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?
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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My thing is every generation of Americans has to answer what we call the 'Superman Question.' Superman comes, lands in America. He's illegal. He's one of these kids. He's wrapped up in a red bullfighter's cape. And you've got to decide what we're gonna do with Superman.
Junot Diaz
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The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.
Junot Diaz
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It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.
Junot Diaz
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You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.
Junot Diaz
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For me, the battle isn't Hillary [Clinton] vs. [Bernie] Sanders. And I understand that for some people that's the battle. But for me, more than anything, it's stopping a Republican president.
Junot Diaz
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I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
Junot Diaz