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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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Junot Diaz
Age: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Art
Writing
Really
Would
Mysterious
Understood
Maybe
Write

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
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It took me sixteen years to write.
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If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves
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I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
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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.
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God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.
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I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.
Junot Diaz
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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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New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
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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.
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I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films.
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The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.
Junot Diaz
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That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
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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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I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.
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I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.
Junot Diaz
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If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original.
Junot Diaz
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When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.
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Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.
Junot Diaz
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This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is.
Junot Diaz