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Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.

Junot Diaz

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Junot Diaz
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Dominican
Definitely
Told
Women
Look
Looks
Men
Time

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A person doesn't mourn forever.
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When you're the ones in the life raft and you have four or five women in the life raft who put it together, by the end of it your nerves are blown. The people you're going to attack are the people who are helping you, who you are holding it together with.
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I find reading to be a delight, a source of comfort, a way to explore.
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I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.
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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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I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
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I feel most like myself... after I run - I go out for five miles every morning.
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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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The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.
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...sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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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.
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When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.
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If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original.
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I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
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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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I think men spend so much time passing for being men. There's a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd. But it was the thing we weren't saying, that people were afraid to say, like, Yo, what we do is nerdy by definition.
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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.
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I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
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Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'
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People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.
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