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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.
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
Illusion
Wants
Practice
Also
Able
Live
Country
Tolerant
Intolerance
More quotes by Junot Diaz
'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.
Junot Diaz
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.
Junot Diaz
You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it? There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It's just a matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.
Junot Diaz
When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.
Junot Diaz
Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
Junot Diaz
Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.
Junot Diaz
I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.
Junot Diaz
My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.
Junot Diaz
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.
Junot Diaz
I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
Junot Diaz
New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
Junot Diaz
Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
Junot Diaz
You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.
Junot Diaz
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
You can't be a human without seeing.
Junot Diaz
You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
Junot Diaz
I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
Junot Diaz
The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.
Junot Diaz
Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.
Junot Diaz
Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory you won't see it often.
Junot Diaz