Feel Quotes

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Junot Diaz

American

December 31, 1968

Writer

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I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet.

Tags: Am I Am Person

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I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.

Tags: Just New Kid

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I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.

Tags: Like Most Myself

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Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.

Tags: Work Thing Where

Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous.

Tags: You Just Get

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I love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school.

Tags: Like Love Only

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.

Tags: People Think I Think

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.

Tags: Just Then School

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.

Tags: Work Power Poetry

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.

Tags: Up Lot Other

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.

Tags: Home You Make

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.

Tags: You Like Where

I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it.

Tags: Truth Think Just

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.

Tags: Women Me Like

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.

Tags: Good You Think

We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell; but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.

Tags: People Like Who

Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.

Tags: Would Way Us

I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.

Tags: Time Home Like

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.

Tags: Me About Think

I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood.

Tags: Time Dreams Just