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I Mean, The Nation In Which We Live - And The World In Which We Live - Is So Extraordinarily More Like A Future Than The Futures That We're Being Sold On The Screen And On Television.

-Junot Diaz

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I Mean, The Nation

Junot Diaz

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I Mean, The Nation In Which We Live - And The World In Which We Live - Is So Extraordinarily More Like A Future Than The Futures That We're Being Sold On The Screen And On Television.

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Sadness At Being Caught, At The Incontrovertibe Knowledge That She Will Never Forgive You.

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Falling In Love

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.

On The Outside, Oscar Simply Looked Tired, No Taller, No Fatter, Only The Skin Under His Eyes, Pouched From Years Of Quiet Desperation, Had Changed. Inside, He Was In A World Of Hurt. He Saw Black Flashes Before His Eyes. He Saw Himself Falling Through The Air. He Knew What He Was Turning Into. He Was Turning Into The Worst Kind Of Human On The Planet: An Old Bitter Dork. Saw Himself At The Game Room, Picking Through The Miniatures For The Rest Of His Life. He Didn't Want This Future But He Couldn't See How It Could Be Avoided, Couldn't Figure His Way Out Of It. Fukú.

Once Someone Gets A Little Escape Velocity Going, Ain't No Play In The World That Will Keep Them From Leaving.

A First Lesson In The Fragility Of Love And The Preternatural Cowardice Of Men. And Out Of This Disillusionment And Turmoil Sprang Beli's First Adult Oath, One That Would Follow Her Into Adulthood, To The States And Beyond. I Will Not Serve.

Tell Her That You Love Her Hair, That You Love Her Skin, Her Lips, Because, In Truth, You Love Them More Than You Love Your Own.

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.

Because I Can't Seem To Escape It. It's A Way For Me To Address And Counter My Questions About What It Means To Be Human, Or, In My Case A Dominican Human Who Grew Up In New Jersey.

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Nilda Is Watching The Ground As Though She's Afraid She Might Fall. My Heart Is Beating And I Think, We Could Do Anything. We Could Marry. We Could Drive Off To The West Coast. We Could Start Over. It's All Possible But Neither Of Us Speaks For A Long Time And The Moment Closes And We're Back In The World We've Always Known.

It's Just A Matter Of Willpower. The Day You Decide It's Over, It's Over. You Never Get Over It.

I Always Think About Myself As A Writer; That Comes Out Of Being A Reader First, And I Don't Think I Kind Of Got To Really Playing With Language In Any Formal Way Probably Until I Was In My Mid-twenties.

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I Sat Down Next To Her. Took Her Hand. This Can Work, I Said. All We Have To Do Is Try.

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.

Asking Questions

There's Little Question That Short Stories, Like Poetry, Don't Get The Respect They Deserve In The Culture - But What Can You Do? Like Canute, One Cannot Fight The Sea, You Have To Go With Your Love, And Hope One Day, Things Change.

I Grew Up In The Shadow Of The Trujillato, Saw How The Regime Had Ravaged So Many Families.

This Is What I Know: People's Hopes Go On Forever.

I Guess It's True What They Say: If You Wait Long Enough Everything Changes.

What Else She Doesn't Know: That The Man Next To Her Would End Up Being Her Husband And The Father Of Her Two Children, That After Two Years Together He Would Leave Her, Her Third And Final Heartbreak, And She Would Never Love Again.

That’s Life For You. All The Happiness You Gather To Yourself, It Will Sweep Away Like It’s Nothing. If You Ask Me I Don’t Think There Are Any Such Things As Curses. I Think There Is Only Life. That’s Enough.

Used To Be In The Old Days, Only The Pulp Writers Wrote Like Machines. Now Everybody Is Expected To Be Literary John Henrys. So In That Context Someone Like Me Is An Anomaly.

I Am A Chatty Person, But Colossally Discreet.

Migration Gives A Blank Cheque To Put Anything You Don't Feel Like Addressing In The Memory Hold. No Neighbours Can Go Against The Monster Narrative Of Your Family.

My Thing Is, I'm Just Way Too Harsh. It's An Enormous Impediment, And That's Just The Truth Of It. It Doesn't Make Me Any Better, Make Me Any Worse, It Certainly Isn't More Valorous. I Have A Character Defect, Man.

I Seem To Have To Make My Characters Family Before I Can Access Their Hearts In Any Way That Matters.

I've Always Thought That You Don't Love A Country By Turning A Blind Eye To Its Crimes And To A Problem. The Way That You Love A Country Is By Seeing Everything That It's Done Wrong, All Of Its Mistakes, And Still Thinking That It's Beautiful And That It's Worthy.

In Order To Write The Book You Want To Write, In The End You Have To Become The Person You Need To Become To Write That Book.

[donald] Trump Is What Happens In America Every Time It Feels Economically And Politically Threatened, And It Encounters The Limitations Of Its Own White Supremacists Practices.

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.

But Back Then, In Those First Days, I Was So Alone That Every Day Was Like Eating My Own Heart.

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.

- Nothing Else Has Any Efficacy, I Might As Well Be Myself. - But Your Yourself Sucks! - It Is, Lamentably, All I Have.

My Novel, Which I Had Started With Such Hope Shortly After Publishing My First Book Of Stories, Wouldn't Budge Past The 75-page Mark. Nothing I Wrote Past Page 75 Made Any Kind Of Sense. Nothing. Which Would Have Been Fine If The First 75 Pages Hadn't Been Pretty Damn Cool.

I Think That Most Of My Writer Friends Are Really Compulsive. I Think That's Great. It's Wonderful For Them. It's Just Not My Bag. It's Not The Way I Work. But Again, It's Probably Why My Friend Has Ten Books Out And I Have Two.

Love Is The Great Test Of The Human. The Human Is Tested By Our Ability To Withstand Love. Love Is So Difficult, It Is So Challenging, It Demands Of Us That We Wreck It With Ourselves. It Demands Of Us An Honesty That Few Of Us Could Sustain.

God Bless Perseverance. Because It's Not Easy.

We Have A Whole Bunch Of Young People And A Whole Bunch Of Families. Are We Going To Disrupt These Families And Tear Them Apart? Or Are We Going Think, Like, Listen - These People Are Here. We’ve Got To Deal With This Reality. We’ve Got To Extend The Franchise.

I Mean, I’m An Artist By Nature, No One Considers What I Do And No One Knows Who The Heck I Am, But That Anybody Does - It Is Astonishing.

I've Been Trying To Write. I Also Spent A Lot Of Time On Different Campuses, In Conversation, Helping Other Writers. That's What I Do: I Teach Them Writing.

The Only Difference Between A Published And Unpublished Writer Is A Tolerance For Imperfection.

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.

I Wring My Hands Because I Know That As A Dude, My Privilege, My Long-term Deficiencies Work Against Me In Writing Women, No Matter How Hard I Try And How Talented I Am.

You Can't Regret The Life You Didn't Lead.

The Body Is What Reminds Us On A Daily Basis That We're Human. The Body Defies Us, It Betrays Us, We Have To Struggle With It, You Know. And It Reveals In Curious And In Abiding Ways How We Are Not Perfect.

Nobody Warned Me That When You Fall In Love, You Really Fall In Love Forever.

Falling In Love

...sometimes A Start Is All We Ever Get.

There's Nothing More True In Being A Child Of A Diaspora, A Child Of Immigrants. We're Completely New To Our Parents. We're Not Something They Can Ever Understand. And It's Not As If We Are Ever Going To Be Accepted. We're Accepted As Long As We Conform To What We Are Expected To Be, And I'm Sure That's Not Any Different For Anyone Else.

I Love “the Autobiography Of Malcolm X.” That Was Like The Only Black Book We Read In High School...

I Guess I'm Just Hopelessly Fascinated By The Realities That You Can Assemble Out Of Connected Fragments.

A Form Wherein We Can Enjoy Simultaneously What Is Best In Both The Novel And The Short Story Form. My Plan Was To Create A Book That Affords Readers Some Of The Novel's Long-form Pleasures But That Also Contains The Short Story's Ability To Capture What Is So Difficult About Being Human - The Brevity Of Our Moments, Their Cruel Irrevocability.

The Thoughts He Put In Her Head. Someone Should’ve Arrested Him For It.

The Anti-immigrant Logic Has Basically Saturated Our World. I'm Staying, And I'm Fighting.

I Can't Imagine Anybody Who Ends Up Being An Artist Who Didn't Pass Through A Time Of Geekiness.

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.

You Were At The Age Where You Could Fall In Love With A Girl Over An Expression, Over A Gesture

Falling In Love

You Can't Find Intimacy - You Can't Find Home - When You're Always Hiding Behind Masks. Intimacy Requires A Certain Level Of Vulnerability. It Requires A Certain Level Of You Exposing Your Fragmented, Contradictory Self To Someone Else. You Running The Risk Of Having Your Core Self Rejected And Hurt And Misunderstood.

A Person Doesn't Mourn Forever.

Books Are Wonderful, But They Aren't That Powerful.

But It's Clear To Me That Us Slow-poke Writers Are A Dying Breed. It's Amazing How Thoroughly My Young Writing Students Have Internalized The New Machine Rhythm, The Rush Many Of My Young Writers Are In To Publish. The Majority Don't Want To Sit On A Book For Four, Five Years. The Majority Don't Want To Listen To The Silence Inside And Outside For Their Artistic Imprimatur. The Majority Want To Publish Fast, Publish Now.

We All Dream Dreams Of Unity, Of Purity; We All Dream That There's An Authoritative Voice Out There That Will Explain Things, Including Ourselves. If It Wasn't For Our Longing For These Things, I Doubt The Novel Or The Short Story Would Exist In Its Current Form. I'm Not Going To Say Much More On The Topic. Just Remember: In Dictatorships, Only One Person Is Really Allowed To Speak. And When I Write A Book Or A Story, I Too Am The Only One Speaking, No Matter How I Hide Behind My Characters.

I'm Part Of The People Who Are More Neutral. I'm Just Waiting For The Dust To Settle So That We Can Turn Our Guns Against The Republicans.

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