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I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
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
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Much
Men
Time
Think
Thinking
Passings
Passing
More quotes by 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
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.
Junot Diaz
Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.
Junot Diaz
It took me sixteen years to write.
Junot Diaz
Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.
Junot Diaz
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.
Junot Diaz
I came up under [Ronald] Reagan and under [George] Bush, and what are we to do now? We are here to fight. People can run off all they want. But for me, [Donald] Trump is already in the Dominican Republic.
Junot Diaz
Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.
Junot Diaz
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
I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.
Junot Diaz
For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.
Junot Diaz
Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.
Junot Diaz
You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.
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
'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
I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.
Junot Diaz
Katrina was one of those things that rips the clothes off of the guy who keeps saying he's a saint, and underneath you see that he's a monster.
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
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.
Junot Diaz
Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
Junot Diaz
