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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: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Call
Racists
White
Lawn
Like
Lawns
People
Burn
Racist
Prefer
Cross
Crosses
Supremacist

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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I was in fact pretty much - by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV - encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men.
Junot Diaz
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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.
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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Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
Junot Diaz
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Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.
Junot Diaz
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You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.
Junot Diaz
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I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished Drown was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.
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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The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.
Junot Diaz
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For my first three books the setting (or place if you will) has always been a given - N.J. and the Dominican Republic and some N.Y.C. - so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first.
Junot Diaz
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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
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New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
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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'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.
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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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
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I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz