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" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Better
Place
Space
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" I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse. "
Junot Diaz
Know
You
Think
" I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get. "
Junot Diaz
Get
Kid
You
" Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards. "
Junot Diaz
Live
Awards
Books
" God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy. "
Junot Diaz
Because
Perseverance
God
" 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
" 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
" There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way. "
Junot Diaz
Lost
Character
Loss
" Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it. "
Junot Diaz
Truth
American
Future
" John Carter was also one of our first recognizable superhumans and there is little doubt that his extraordinary physical feats inspired Superman's creators. Remember: before Superman could fly or turn back time, he was nothing less than an earthbound crime-fighting John Carter in tights. "
Junot Diaz
Time
Remember
Fly
" My father was a trigamist; he supported three families. We were never not poor. "
Junot Diaz
Poor
Three
Families
" I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet. "
Junot Diaz
Am
I Am
Discreet
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Got
Your
You
" 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. "
Junot Diaz
Love Is
Great
Love
" 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 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
" I sleep way too much and I read tremendously. "
Junot Diaz
Read
Too Much
Much
" 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
" 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 guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments. "
Junot Diaz
Just
Out
Guess
" I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films. "
Junot Diaz
Fall
Diet
Born
" I feel most like myself... after I run - I go out for five miles every morning. "
Junot Diaz
Like
Morning
Feel
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses. "
Junot Diaz
Look
Most
Myself
" 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
" I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families. "
Junot Diaz
How
Had
Many
" '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