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" I'm of African descent and my sister looks completely black, but I didn't look black. I was the super-nerdy kid who was also willing to fight. "
Junot Diaz
Sister
Looks
Look
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" To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail. "
Junot Diaz
Fail
Just
Outsider
" 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 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
" 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
" I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category. "
Junot Diaz
Safe
Category
Enough
" Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever. "
Junot Diaz
Forever
Nobody
Me
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Women
Broken
Love
" 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
" I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that. "
Junot Diaz
Start
School
High School
" 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
Me
" My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power. "
Junot Diaz
Me
Little
Father
" Long before the idea of multiculturalism, in public people could say almost anything to you and get away with it. "
Junot Diaz
Say
You
People
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Universe
New York
Vision
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Poetry
Work
Power
" I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments. "
Junot Diaz
Just
Out
Guess
" 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
" Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking. "
Junot Diaz
Dictatorship
Always
Like
" 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
Me
" 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
" I read a book a week, man. And I don't have a great memory, but I have a good memory about what I read. "
Junot Diaz
Great
Week
Memory
" Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre. "
Junot Diaz
Some
Your
Narrative
" 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
" 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
" I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses. "
Junot Diaz
Look
Most
Myself
" 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
" I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard. "
Junot Diaz
Always
Someone
Die
" Even I thought I would be a writer who put something out every year. But that's not how it worked out. "
Junot Diaz
Year
Writer
Thought
" The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are. "
Junot Diaz
Women
Writing
Work
" Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.' "
Junot Diaz
Something
Because
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. "
Junot Diaz
People
Enjoy
Writing