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" 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. "

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" 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

Human

Weak

" 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. "

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

Junot Diaz

Dictatorship

Always

" I mean, the nation in which we live - and the world in which we live - is so extraordinarily more like a future than the futures that we're being sold on the screen and on television. "

" When I enter that higher-order space that's required to write, I'm a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it's ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We get these lives for free. I didn't do anything to get this life, and no matter what the hardships are, it is free and, in a way, it's an extraordinary bargain. "

" New Jersey is to New York what Santo Domingo is to the United States. I always felt that those two landscapes, not only just the landscapes themselves but their relationships to what we would call 'a center' or 'the center of the universe,' has in some ways defined my artistic and critical vision. "

" 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. "

" 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 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

Back

Book

" I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power. "

Junot Diaz

Little

Father

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy. "

" Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time. "

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

Junot Diaz

History

Latino

" 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. "

" You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I became my masked identity I was this incredible little nerd, but in the real world I had to be this tough kid from the neighborhood. "

" I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year. "

Junot Diaz

Year

Try

" It's extraordinary how many people read a book that's new and weird and befriend it. "

" 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. "