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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. "
Junot Diaz
Me
Always
Myself
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" 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
" 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'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey. "
Junot Diaz
Jersey
New
Kid
" Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston. "
Junot Diaz
Between
Boston
My Time
" Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever. "
Junot Diaz
Forever
Nobody
Me
" 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
Like
Back
Book
" Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it. "
Junot Diaz
Truth
American
Future
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Culture
Silenced
Tourism
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Think
Now
Enough
" Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy. "
Junot Diaz
About
Intimacy
Profound
" It took me sixteen years to write. "
Junot Diaz
Sixteen
Years
Write
" The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones. "
Junot Diaz
People
Immigrant
Ending
" We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way. "
Junot Diaz
Hidden
Way
Name
" I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy. "
Junot Diaz
Beautiful
Eye
Love
" 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
Three
Place
Perspective
" '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
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Us
Human
Weak
" I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard. "
Junot Diaz
Always
Someone
Die
" 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 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 greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place. "
Junot Diaz
Live
Responsibility
Place
" People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it. "
Junot Diaz
Experience
People
You
" 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
" 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
" It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don't find out you're an artist because you do something really well. "
Junot Diaz
Struggle
You
Artist
" I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones. "
Junot Diaz
Up
People
Food
" I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful. "
Junot Diaz
Beautiful
Know
You
" Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous. "
Junot Diaz
Breathe
You
World
" I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them. "
Junot Diaz
Telling
Enjoy
Seem
" Even I thought I would be a writer who put something out every year. But that's not how it worked out. "
Junot Diaz
Year
Writer
Thought