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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.

-Junot Diaz

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I've Always Thought That

Junot Diaz

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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.

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I Know For A Fact That - It's Just The Way Our Biases Work Now In The Industry Of Literature, But Certainly A Short Story Collection Does Not Receive The Same Kind Of Attention As A Novel.

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I Was In Fact Pretty Much - By The Larger Culture, By The Local Culture, By People Around Me, By People On Tv - Encouraged To Imagine Women As Something Slightly Inferior To Men.

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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.

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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.

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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[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.

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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

[immigrating] Didn't Burn Out My Desire To Travel, Though That Can Happen. There's Nothing Like Immigration To Make You Want To Just Stay Put. But What I Think Of As Home Is This Life Between Santo Domingo And The Parts Of New Jersey And New York City That Were My Childhood, So In My Mind It's Like Home Is All Those Things Combined.

Privilege Does Not Operate Without Silence.

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.

'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.

Run A Hand Through Your Hair, Like The White Boys Do, Even Though The Only Thing That Runs Easily Through Your Hair Is Africa.

Books Don't Live And Die By Awards. You Don't Listen To An Hector Lavoe Album Because It Won Some Awards.

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.

I Think That America Is Such An Incredibly Dynamic Place Because Of Immigration. We Fundamentally Have Been A Culture That's Been Put Together From The Explosions Of Other Cultures. But It's Hard For Us To See. We Have Blinded Ourselves To The Reality Of What Our Country Is.

Then You Look At Her And Smile A Smile Your Dissembling Face Will Remember Until The Day You Die. Baby, You Say, Baby, This Is Part Of My Novel. This Is How You Lose Her.

Do You Remember? When The Fights Seemed To Go On And On, And Always Ended With Us In Bed, Tearing At Each Other Like Maybe That Could Change Everything. In A Couple Of Months You'd Be Seeing Somebody Else And I Would Too; She Was No Darker Than You But She Washed Her Panties In The Shower And Had Hair Like A Sea Of Little Punos And The First Time You Saw Us, You Turned Around And Boarded A Bus I Knew You Didn't Have To Take. When My Girl Said, Who Was That? I Said, Just Some Girl.

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For Me I Was Always A Smart Nerdy Kid. I Wasn't The Smartest And I Wasn't The Nerdiest, But I Was A Smart Nerdy Kid My Whole Childhood, And I Definitely Wanted To Be Somehow Involved With Reading The Rest Of My Life, And I Came From A Community, I Lived In A Community, I Was Part Of A Community Where Reading Was Considered Completely Alien.

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.

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.

Usually At The End Of Each Story We're Thrown Clear Out Of The Story's World And Then We're Given A New World To Enter. What's Unique About A Linked Collection Is That It Can Deliver Both Sets Of Narrative Pleasures - The Novel's Long Immersion Into Character-world And The Story Anthology's Energetic (and Mortal) Brevity - The Linked Collection Is Unique In Its Ability To Be Both Abrupt And Longitudinal Simultaneously.

The People I Know Who Would Support [donald] Trump Are Keeping Their Mouths Shut.

Motherfuckers Will Read A Book That’s One Third Elvish, But Put Two Sentences In Spanish And They [white People] Think We’re Taking Over.

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.

I Find Reading To Be A Delight, A Source Of Comfort, A Way To Explore.

I Can See Myself Watching Him Shave Every Morning. And At Other Time I See Us In That House And See How One Bright Day (or A Day Like This, So Cold Your Mind Shifts Every Time The Wind Does) He Will Wake Up And Decide It's All Wrong. I'm Sorry, He'll Say. I Have To Leave Now.

When I Became My Masked Identity I Was This Incredible Little Nerd, But In The Real World I Had To Be This Tough Kid From The Neighborhood.

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.

Spin Is 'something Is Beautiful Because We Say It's Beautiful.'

We Hide So Well. This Is The Bottom Line: How Hidden Is Male Subjectivity? Name Five Books Where Male Subjectivity Is Produced In An Honest Way.

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.

I Really Am A Believer That 99.99% Of All The Stories We Need, Not Only As Artists But As Human Beings, Not Only As Writers But As Readers, Haven't Been Written Yet. Certainly Haven't Been Published Yet.

She Would Be A New Person, She Vowed. They Said No Matter How Far A Mule Travels It Can Never Come Back A Horse, But She Would Show Them All.

For A Long Time, I Let My Mother Say What She Wanted About Me, And What Was Worse, For A Long Time I Believed Her.

I Think Men Spend So Much Time Passing For Being Men.

I Always Individuate Myself From Other Writers Who Say They Would Die If They Couldn't Write. For Me, I'd Die If I Couldn't Read.

My African Roots Made Me What I Am Today. They're The Reason I Exist At All.

There's A Long-term Tradition Of White Supremacy In This Country. [donald] Trump Isn't Something Entirely New. But Then There Is The Crisis For White Supremacy In This Country Now Where You Have People Of Color Standing Up For Themselves In Ways That They've Never Stood Up For Themselves Or At Least Standing Up For Themselves In A Generational, Novel Way.

You Ask Everybody You Know: How Long Does It Usually Take To Get Over It? There Are Many Formulas. One Year For Every Year You Dated. Two Years For Every Year You Dated. It's Just A Matter Of Will Power: The Day You Decide It's Over, It's Over. You Never Get Over It.

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.

When I Got Heartbroken At 20, It Just Felt Like Someone Had Spiraled A Football Right Into My Skull. At 40, It Feels Like Someone Had Driven A 757 Right Through Me.

In Minority Communities There's A Sensitivity, Often A Knee-jerk Reaction, To Critical Representations. There's A Misunderstanding Of What An Artist Does.

Mexico City Is The Center Of Art And Culture And Politics And Has Been And Continues To Be For Latin America In A Way That I Think Really Called To Me As An Artistic Person, As Someone That Was Interested In The Politics Of Latin America, You Know. God, Every Single Famous Person In Latin American History And Art And Politics Seems To Have Found Their Way To Mexico City.

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.

Colleagues Are A Wonderful Thing - But Mentors, That's Where The Real Work Gets Done.

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

Success, After All, Loves A Witness, But Failure Can't Exist Without One.

You Know How It Is When You Get Back With Somebody You’ve Loved. It Felt Better Than It Ever Was, Better Than It Ever Could Be Again

Shot At Twenty-seven Times - What A Dominican Number.

When I Was Thinking About These Women Characters, No Matter How Bad A Person I Am - A Bad Writer, My Limitations, My Sexism, You Know - The Thought Was, It Would Be Useful As A Writer To Try To Create A Template For All The Male Writers, Especially Dominican Male Writers, Especially Males Of Color, Of How A Writer Can Use Seeing To Create More Nuanced Representations Of Women.

Anger Has A Way Of Returning.

I Don't Think You Can Be From The Caribbean And Not Know A Certain Amount About The Apocalypse.

Nothing More Exhilarating ... Than Saving Yourself By The Simple Act Of Waking.

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.

Lacking Something

If We Do Not Begin To Practice The Muscles Of Having A Possessive Investment In Each Other's Oppressions, Then We Are In Some Serious Trouble.

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Peter Matthiessen

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