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" 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
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" 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
" 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
" My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants. "
Junot Diaz
Care
She
Father
" 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
" A young person, or someone who's writing in a different way - in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it's good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value. "
Junot Diaz
Value
Writing
You
" Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous. "
Junot Diaz
Breathe
You
World
" New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino. "
Junot Diaz
Me
History
Latino
" 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
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Person
Kind
I Am
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Always
Start
Immigrant
" I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get. "
Junot Diaz
Get
Kid
You
" 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
" 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
" You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods. "
Junot Diaz
You
Never Forget
Try
" Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper. "
Junot Diaz
Poetry
Words
Dance
" Stereotypes, they're sensual, cultural weapons. That's the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing. "
Junot Diaz
Way
Level
People
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Beautiful
Know
You
" 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
" 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
" 'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated. "
Junot Diaz
Mars
Princess
Influence
" I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field. "
Junot Diaz
People
Nothing
Wrong
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses. "
Junot Diaz
Look
Most
Myself
" My father was a trigamist; he supported three families. We were never not poor. "
Junot Diaz
Poor
Three
Families
" 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
" I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet. "
Junot Diaz
Am
I Am
Discreet