American - Writer | December 31, 1968 -
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
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I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.
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I do think that we all draw limits and I feel like part of the work of an artist is it shouldn't be fun. This shouldn't be comfortable. I'm not looking to make people feel unsafe, but I am looking to make people feel uncomfortable.
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Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
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It took me sixteen years to write.
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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.
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'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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
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Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.
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