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" I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it. "
Junot Diaz
Truth
Awesome
Nice
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" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Fall
Diet
Born
" We have a whole bunch of young people and a whole bunch of families. Are we going to disrupt these families and tear them apart? Or are we going think, like, listen - these people are here. We've got to deal with this reality. We've got to extend the franchise. "
Junot Diaz
Think
Reality
People
" 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
" 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
" Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking. "
Junot Diaz
Dictatorship
Always
Like
" I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey. "
Junot Diaz
Jersey
New
Kid
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Artist
I Am
Mean
" Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever. "
Junot Diaz
Forever
Nobody
Me
" If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original. "
Junot Diaz
Original
Like
You
" 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
" I'm sure I'm one of those undiagnosed people with social anxiety. "
Junot Diaz
Anxiety
People
Sure
" Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done. "
Junot Diaz
Work
Colleagues
Done
" 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
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
View
Hope
Amazing
" 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
" We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. "
Junot Diaz
Dreams
Out
Will
" 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
" When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That's what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live. "
Junot Diaz
Courage
Myself
Live
" I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever. "
Junot Diaz
Will
Immigrant
Stay
" 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
" New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino. "
Junot Diaz
Me
History
Latino
" 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
" There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way. "
Junot Diaz
Lost
Character
Loss
" 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
" 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
" When I got heartbroken at 20, it just felt like someone had spiraled a football right into my skull. At 40, it feels like someone had driven a 757 right through me. "
Junot Diaz
Got
Right
Me
" I wrote my first sucio story, as I call them, in 1997. This was always my 'cheater's book,' my book about sucios desgraciados. My plan was to write a book about how people deal with love and loss. "
Junot Diaz
Loss
People
Love
" I sleep way too much and I read tremendously. "
Junot Diaz
Read
Too Much
Much
" 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
" I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families. "
Junot Diaz
How
Had
Many