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All Quotes by author - Junot Diaz

" Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time. "

" '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. "

" Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite. "

" Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it. "

" Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in. "

" A young person, or someone who's writing in a different way - in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it's good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value. "

" Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking. "

" Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards. "

" Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable. "

" Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" Even I thought I would be a writer who put something out every year. But that's not how it worked out. "

" Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it. "

" For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature. "

" For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe. "

" 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. "

" Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre. "

" God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy. "

" I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet. "

" I am a person who dreads any kind of public exposure and any kind of public event. I spend all day, if I have to do a reading, preparing. "

" I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard. "

" I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness. "

" 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. "

" I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field. "

" I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it. "

" I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse. "

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