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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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Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for.
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This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.
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I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.
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I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.
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For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.
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As an artist you're on a journey of discovery and sometimes that journey takes a long time, doesn't subscribe to [a] train schedule, to the punch-clock. And I need to read a lot to make my pages happen.
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As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.
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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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Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.
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My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.
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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.
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It took me sixteen years to write.
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In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work.
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It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)
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She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.
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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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What a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are).
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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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I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity. It's like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves.
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I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.
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