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" 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. "

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" 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

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" 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. "

" I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work. "

" 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. "

" 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

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" '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. "

" 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. "

" I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness. "

" 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. "

" The thing is, you try your best, and what else you got? You try your best, really, that's all you can do. And for me, my best happens really so rarely. "

" I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field. "

" 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