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I prefer the 1950s where people were like, I'm a white supremacist, and that's who I am. Now people want to burn a cross on your lawn and call themselves not racists.

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
Cross
Crosses
Supremacist
Call
Racists
White
Lawn
Like
Lawns
People
Burn
Racist
Prefer

More quotes by 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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but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
Junot Diaz
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In fact, looking at the darkest sides of the United States has only made me appreciate the things that we do right, the things that we do beautifully. We are, for all of our mistakes and all of our crimes, a remarkable place.
Junot Diaz
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The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.
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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The U.S. that I had imagined was nowhere near as crazy and as incredibly damaging and brutal and indifferent as the U.S. that we're currently living in. I thought I was being transgressive, apocalyptic, an out-there person. And then reality lapped me, it just lapped me.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
Junot Diaz
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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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Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
Junot Diaz
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I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
Junot Diaz
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New Jersey is to New York what Santo Domingo is to the United States. I always felt that those two landscapes, not only just the landscapes themselves but their relationships to what we would call 'a center' or 'the center of the universe,' has in some ways defined my artistic and critical vision.
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 can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.
Junot Diaz
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Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.
Junot Diaz
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Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.
Junot Diaz
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People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.
Junot Diaz
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You can't be a human without seeing.
Junot Diaz