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" I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons. "
Junot Diaz
Object
Writing
Tales
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" I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work. "
Junot Diaz
Resources
Write
Work
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
You
Boy
Fear
" Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for. "
Junot Diaz
Day
Learning
Power
" 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
Like
Year
Try
" 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 love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school. "
Junot Diaz
Love
School
Black
" 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 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
" I'm sure I'm one of those undiagnosed people with social anxiety. "
Junot Diaz
Anxiety
People
Sure
" 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
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Work
Writing
Train
" 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
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Need
Only
Really
" I'm still trying to figure out how to write about cancer and my family's experience with it. If I had been able to write 'The Pura Principle' back in those days, I'm positive it would have had no humor in it. Which means the story would have been false. "
Junot Diaz
Family
Positive
Humor
" 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 find infidelity interesting because it's so revelatory about people. It's this really silent thing. Everyone acknowledges it as a general practice, but nobody likes to go beyond that, to get down to the nitty-gritty. "
Junot Diaz
Down
Go
Interesting
" When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling. "
Junot Diaz
Read
Wanted
Writing
" 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
" New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino. "
Junot Diaz
Me
History
Latino
" 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
" I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey. "
Junot Diaz
Jersey
New
Kid
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
I Am
Hands
Writing
" 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
" In minority communities there's a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There's a misunderstanding of what an artist does. "
Junot Diaz
Reaction
Artist
Does
" I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them. "
Junot Diaz
Telling
Enjoy
Seem
" 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 don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse. "
Junot Diaz
Know
You
Think
" My father was a trigamist; he supported three families. We were never not poor. "
Junot Diaz
Poor
Three
Families
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Busy
Job
Living
" '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