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" I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel. "

Junot Diaz

Story

Short

Attention

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Junot Diaz

Dictatorship

Always

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

" I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections. "

" I mean, I'm an artist by nature; no one considers what I do and no one knows who the heck I am, but that anybody does - it is astonishing. "

" 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. "

" I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston. "

" There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction. "

" 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. "

" John Carter was also one of our first recognizable superhumans and there is little doubt that his extraordinary physical feats inspired Superman's creators. Remember: before Superman could fly or turn back time, he was nothing less than an earthbound crime-fighting John Carter in tights. "

" It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked. "

" 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. "

" 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

" Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous. "

" I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them. "

" Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.' "

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

" To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail. "

" I really am a believer that 99.99% of all the stories we need, not only as artists but as human beings, not only as writers but as readers, haven't been written yet. Certainly haven't been published yet. "

" Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something. "

" The thing is, you try your best, and what else you got? You try your best, really, that's all you can do. And for me, my best happens really so rarely. "

" Long before the idea of multiculturalism, in public people could say almost anything to you and get away with 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. "

" I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments. "

" '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. "