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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
Mars
Princess
Influence
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" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Person
Kind
I Am
" I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived. "
Junot Diaz
Past
Ghosts
Identity
" My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool. "
Junot Diaz
Book
Past
Page
" When I think about my own relationships to the women that I really loved, it feels like that love, even after we've broken up and we're no longer speaking, that love never goes away. No one told me that. "
Junot Diaz
Women
Broken
Love
" In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work. "
Junot Diaz
You
Work
Today
" New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino. "
Junot Diaz
Me
History
Latino
" 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
Men
Me
Culture
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Fall
You
Think
" '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
Book
Connected
Always
" So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know. "
Junot Diaz
You
Boy
Fear
" I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field. "
Junot Diaz
People
Nothing
Wrong
" I'm one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I've been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola. "
Junot Diaz
Always
Start
Immigrant
" I mean, look, we're living in a country where you can't have a non-denominational response. If you're slightly critical of either party, all of the partisans jump on you like you're a lunatic. "
Junot Diaz
Living
Country
Look
" I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses. "
Junot Diaz
Look
Most
Myself
" 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
Start
School
High School
" I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them. "
Junot Diaz
Telling
Enjoy
Seem
" 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
Time
Powerful
Back
" We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell; but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe. "
Junot Diaz
Reading
People
Writing
" I do think that we all draw limits and I feel like part of the work of an artist is it shouldn't be fun. This shouldn't be comfortable. I'm not looking to make people feel unsafe, but I am looking to make people feel uncomfortable. "
Junot Diaz
Fun
I Am
Looking
" I sleep way too much and I read tremendously. "
Junot Diaz
Read
Too Much
Much
" My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power. "
Junot Diaz
Me
Little
Father
" I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet. "
Junot Diaz
Am
I Am
Discreet
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Me
Moment
Prize
" I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category. "
Junot Diaz
Safe
Category
Enough
" 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
Looking
Place
Me
" I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work. "
Junot Diaz
Resources
Write
Work
" The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are. "
Junot Diaz
Women
Writing
Work
" I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse. "
Junot Diaz
Know
You
Think
" I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood. "
Junot Diaz
Dreams
Shadow
Time
" My thing is every generation of Americans has to answer what we call the 'Superman Question.' Superman comes, lands in America. He's illegal. He's one of these kids. He's wrapped up in a red bullfighter's cape. And you've got to decide what we're gonna do with Superman. "
Junot Diaz
Question
You
America