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" 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. "

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" Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they're asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power. "

Junot Diaz

Power

Questions

Science

" My father was a trigamist; he supported three families. We were never not poor. "

" 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. "

" Let me tell you, if I could write one-tenth as fast as some of my friends, I'd be made. I'd be it. But instead I happen to be, in the tree of life of writers, down at the bottom, with the hematodes. "

Junot Diaz

Life

Fast

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

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

" Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever. "

" 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. "

" Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families. "

" My thing is, I'm just way too harsh. It's an enormous impediment, and that's just the truth of it. It doesn't make me any better, make me any worse, it certainly isn't more valorous. I have a character defect, man. "

Junot Diaz

Man

Character

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Moment

Prize

" New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino. "

Junot Diaz

History

Latino

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

" '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. "

" You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. "

" I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons. "

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

" I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished 'Drown' was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow. "

" It took me sixteen years to write. "