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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.

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
Thinking
Started
Life
Taught
Happened
Women
Refusing
Look
Passive
Looks
Figure
Always
Looked
Think
Figures

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.
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I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.
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As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.
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Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.
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Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.
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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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Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.
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This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.
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I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
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There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.
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New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
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The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.
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We can speculate. Last time I checked, the future doesn't take my advice.
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Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.
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Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
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It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
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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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Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
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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 one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are.
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