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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.

-Junot Diaz

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We All Dream Dreams

Junot Diaz

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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.

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The Caribbean Is Such An Apocalyptic Place, Whether It's The Decimation Of The Indigenous Populations By The Europeans, Whether It's The Importation Of Slaves And Their Subsequent Being Worked To Death By The Millions In Many Ways, Whether It's The Immigrant Processes Which Began For Many People, New Worlds Ending Their Old Ones.

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New Jersey Is To New York What Santo Domingo Is To The United States. I Always Felt That Those Two Landscapes, Not Only Just The Landscapes Themselves But Their Relationships To What We Would Call 'a Center' Or 'the Center Of The Universe,' Has In Some Ways Defined My Artistic And Critical Vision.

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[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.

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.

You Whispered My Full Name And We Fell Asleep In Each Other's Arms And I Remember How The Next Morning You Were Gone, Completely Gone, And Nothing In My Bed Or The House Could Have Proven Otherwise.

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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.

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People Can Say What They Want, But Historically, Feminism In The Dominican Republic Has Been Extremely Strong. I Guess The Best Way Of Saying It Is That No One Could Have Survived What We Survived - Whether It Was First Extermination And Slavery, Then Abandonment And Erasure, Then The Series Of Gunboat Two-bit Dictatorships, Followed By The Final Apotheosis Of Dictatorships, The Trujillato. You Couldn't Survive It Without The Resistance Of This Kind Of Woman.

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.

It Was Like Being At The Bottom Of An Ocean, She Said. There Was No Light And A Whole Ocean Crushing Down On You. But Most People Had Gotten So Used To It They Thought It Normal, They Forgot Even That There Was A World Above.

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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.

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Part Of It Is Eight Years Of A Black President, And White America Still Lost Their [minds] About That. Part Of It Is A Republican Politics Of Vicious, Vicious Partisan [stuff] That Has Completely Poisoned What We Would Call The Political Rhetorical Sphere. All Of These Things Come Together In A Perfect Storm.

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.

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

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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.

When I Write, What I Long For Is Not More Realism Or Fiction But More Courage. That's What I Always Find Myself Short On And What I Have To Struggle To Achieve In Order That The Work Might Live.

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

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

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

She Was The Kind Of Girlfriend God Gives You Young, So You'll Know Loss The Rest Of Your Life.

We Get These Lives For Free. I Didn't Do Anything To Get This Life, And No Matter What The Hardships Are, It Is Free And, In A Way, It's An Extraordinary Bargain.

You Don't Want To Let Go, But Don't Want To Be Hurt, Either. It's Not A Great Place To Be But What Can I Tell You?

I Seem To Enjoy Telling Stories With A Central Absence, With A Lacuna Tunnelled Into Them.

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Nobody Likes Children, Your Mother Assured You. That Doesn't Mean You Don't Have Them.

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.

In Another Universe I Probably Came Out Ok, Ended Up With Mad Novias And Jobs And A Sea Of Love In Which To Swim, But In This World I Had A Brother Who Was Dying Of Cancer And A Long Dark Patch Of Life Like A Mile Of Black Ice Waiting For Me Up Ahead.

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Any Art Worth Its Name Requires You To Be Fundamentally Lost For A Very Long Time.

She's Sensitive, Too. Takes To Hurt The Way Water Takes To Paper.

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

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Now People Like Susan Sarandon Are Noticing That People Of Color Live This Way?! This Is The Way I've Always Lived! What's Happened Is That It Has Now Reached A Level Of National Discourse Where It's On The Table. But They've Never Minded That We Were Treated Like This Off-stage.

She Had Reason To Doubt Him; He Was Real Good At Planning But Real Bad At Doing.

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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.

Mine (story) Ain't The Scariest, The Clearest, The Most Painful, Or The Most Beautiful. It Just Happens To Be The One That's Got It's Fingers Around My Throat.

She's Applying Her Lipstick; I've Always Believed That The Universe Invented The Color Red Solely For Latinas.

You Said I Could Call You When I Wanted But That You Wouldn’t Call Me. You Have To Decide Where And When, You Said. If You Leave It Up To Me I’ll Want To See You Every Day. At Least You Were Honest, Which Is More Than I Can Say For Me.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

I Can Always Tell If Someone's From Harvard Because They Trot Out Their Vitae. I Would Die At Harvard.

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.

I Spent My Entire Childhood Feeling Like A Freak Because I Liked To Read. It's Just Like, "eh, No One Else Likes To Read But Me; I Must Be Crazy!"

I Love The Kookiness Of Our Speech. Speech Is Like Wonderful Magic And Poetry In Itself. I've Always Had To Crib A Lot From What I've Heard.

This Country Has Such Little Sense Of Itself Sometimes, I'm Astonished. America Is One Of The Biggest Myth-making Countries, Whether We're Talking About How Many Books Are Published, How Many Movies We Make. But The Greatest Myth Of All Is What America Is.

If You Really Want A Prize, Or If You Really Want Applause, You Should Try To Write As Many Books As Humanly Possible.

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.

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.

An Ear Will Never Do You Wrong, But I Know Writers Who... Most Of The Language They Use Is Just Extracted Language From Other Languages They've Read. I Am A Big-time Reader, But I Mix And Match.

In '94, I Started Writing A Novel About An Enormous Terrorist Act That Destroyed The United States. The Novel Takes Place Twenty Years After This Destruction, With All The Stuff That We're Dealing With Now - A Dirty War, The Disappeared, The Concept Of Terrorism. Anyway, 9/11 Happened Some Years Into The Process, And I Was Like, Ok, I Don't Have A Novel.

Every Single Immigrant We Have, Undocumented Or Documented, Is A Future American. That's Just The Truth Of It.

I Discovered Early That As An Artist There Was Absolutely Nothing Wrong With Being Surrounded By People Who Were Not Dedicated To Your Field.

In The Months That Follow You Bend To The Work, Because It Feels Like Hope, Like Grace--and Because You Know In Your Lying Cheater's Heart That Sometimes A Start Is All We Ever Get.

Travel Light. She Extended Her Arms To Embrace Her House, Maybe The Whole World.

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 Came Up Under [ronald] Reagan And Under [george] Bush, And What Are We To Do Now? We Are Here To Fight. People Can Run Off All They Want. But For Me, [donald] Trump Is Already In The Dominican Republic.

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.

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

The U.s. That I Had Imagined Was Nowhere Near As Crazy And As Incredibly Damaging And Brutal And Indifferent As The U.s. That We're Currently Living In. I Thought I Was Being Transgressive, Apocalyptic, An Out-there Person. And Then Reality Lapped Me, It Just Lapped Me.

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

Know That In This World There's Somebody Who Will Always Love You.

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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We Know Story Collections End When They End, As Well - The Pages Serving As A Countdown - But Nevertheless The Standard Story Anthology Hews Closer To What Makes Being Human So Hard: It Reminds You With Each Story How Quickly Everything We Are, Everything We Call Our Lives Can Change, Can Be Upended, Can Disappear. Never To Return.

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

We All Have A Blind Spot And It's Shaped Exactly Like Us.

You Must Learn Her. You Must Know The Reason Why She Is Silent. You Must Trace Her Weakest Spots. You Must Write To Her. You Must Remind Her That You Are There. You Must Know How Long It Takes For Her To Give Up. You Must Be There To Hold Her When She Is About To. You Must Love Her Because Many Have Tried And Failed. And She Wants To Know That She Is Worthy To Be Loved, That She Is Worthy To Be Kept. And, This Is How You Keep Her.

...one Of Those Very Bad Men That Not Even Postmodernism Can Explain Away.

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

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.

For Me, The Battle Isn't Hillary [clinton] Vs. [bernie] Sanders. And I Understand That For Some People That's The Battle. But For Me, More Than Anything, It's Stopping A Republican President.

Love Was A Rare Thing, Easily Confused With A Million Other Things, And If Anybody Knew This To Be True It Was Him.

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.

Clavo Saca Clavo. Nothing Sacas Nothing, You Reply. No One Will Ever Be Like Her.

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.

I'm Just This Dominican Kid From New Jersey.

Beli At Thirteen Believed In Love Like A Seventy-year-old Widow Who's Been Abandoned By Family, Husband, Children And Fortune Believes In God.

As Expected: She, The Daughter Of The Fall, Recipient Of Its Heaviest Radiation, Loved Atomically.

If You're A Status Quo Writer, You're Considered To Not Be Political But That's As Political As If You're A Progressive Writer. Some Politics Are Asked To Show Their Passports And Others Aren't. In The Dominican Republique, If You're Slightly Progressive, People Have A Lot Of Suspicions That You're Up To Some Sort Of Conspiracy, That This Is Some Sort Of Plot. On The Other Hand, If You're Conservative And Mainstream, People Tend To Take That As A Given And Don't Notice The Politics.

In My Mind What Novels Do Best Is That They Immerse Us Deeply Into Our Character's World - They Truly Transport Us Deep Into These Spaces - But The Same Way You Know A Hollywood Movie Won't End After Thirty Minutes, You Carry In Yourself The Implicit Contract That The Novel Won't Throw You Out Of Itself 'til The Very End. That Bulk Of Pages Is A Form Of Consolation, Of Security.

You Were At The Age Where You Could Fall In Love With A Girl Over An Expression, Over A Gesture. That's What Happened With Your Girlfriend, Paloma- She Stooped To Pick Up Her Purse And Your Heart Flew Out Of You.

Falling In Love

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

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 Think That Distance Is Good For Some People For Certain Projects. I Mean This Is Sort Of A Dynamic Question. Some Projects Require More Distance Than Others, Some Don't Require It At All. Sometimes You Need It And Sometimes You Don't.

I Prefer The 1950s Where People Were Like, "i'm A White Supremacist, And That's Who I Am." Now People Want To Burn A Cross On Your Lawn And Call Themselves Not Racists.

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.

Cities Produce Love And Yet Feel None. A Strange Thing When You Think About It, But Perhaps Fitting. Cities Need That Love More Than Most Of Us Care To Imagine. Cities, After All, For All Their Massiveness, All Their There-ness, Are Acutely Vulnerable.

The Greatest Myth Of All Is What America Is. I Think That America Is Such An Incredibly Dynamic Place Because Of Immigration.

I Was Surrounded By A Lot Of Male Writers Of Color Who Have This Incredibly Bizarre Relationship To Masculinity. It's Like We Were All Mega-nerds But You Would Never Know That If You Listened To The Way They Talk About Themselves.

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The Truth Is There Ain’t No Relationship In The World That Doesn’t Hit Turbulence.

A Young Person, Or Someone Who's Writing In A Different Way - In Some Ways You Could Say, Eventually Someone Will Find Them. Eventually Someone Will Hear Them. But It's Good A Lot Of Young People Persevere. Because Sometimes You Have To Send Something Out A Thousand Times Before Anyone Recognizes Your Value.

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.

I Was, As A Kid, Really Obsessed With Reading... That Was About As Geeky As You Could Possibly Get.

Infidelity Raises Profound Questions About Intimacy.

To An Outsider, I Just Seem Like A List Of Accomplishments. To Me, All There Is Is How Often I Fail.

I Think A Lot Of The Most Interesting Immigrant Writing Involves Stepping Outside Of That Old, Dreary Binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker Is A Great Example. Same Goes For Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

You Keep Waiting For The Heaviness To Leave You. You Keep Waiting For The Moment You Never Think About The Ex Again. It Doesn't Come.

Out Of Nowhere You Said, I Love You. For Whatever It's Worth.

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

Falling In Love

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.

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

New Jersey For Me Is So Alive With History. It's Old, Dynamic, African-american, Latino.

African American

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

In My View, A Writer Is A Writer Because Even When There Is No Hope, Even When Nothing You Do Shows Any Sign Of Promise, You Keep Writing Anyway.

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.

I Write Very, Very Slowly, And For Me, I Have To Summon All Sorts Of Resources To Make One Of These Pieces Work.

If You Didn't Grow Up Like I Did Then You Don't Know, And If You Don't Know It's Probably Better You Don't Judge.

Dominican Men Are Told To Look At Women All The Time, But They're Definitely Not Told To See Them.

So The Kind Of Boy I Was, Or That I Was Told To Be, You Were Kind Of This Like Half-gladiator, Half-dude Who, You Know, Was Supposed To Have As Many Girls As Possible And Work Until Your Heart Exploded, Have No Fear, You Know.

The Art Is Just Really Mysterious. If I Understood It More, Maybe I Would Write More.

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

Love Is The Only Thing - I Don't Want To Say That "makes It Bearable" - But I Feel Like Without The Possibility Of Love, This Place Would Just Devour Us.

The Thing Is - Do We Really Need Another Writer Who Writes A Book Every Eighteen Months, Whether The Quality Is Wonderful Or Not? I Mean, Maybe. But I Can Name Twenty Off The Top Of My Head Who Do It. Maybe What We Need Is A Writer Like Me Who Goes Very Slow, As Well.

Art Is Not Boosterism, It's Not Propaganda, And It's Not Spin, But That's Not Something That Art Does, And Nor Has It Historically Ever Done It.

I Am A Chatty Person, But Colossally Discreet.

I'm An Immigrant And I Will Stay An Immigrant Forever.

Literature Is Less Involved In Giving You Answers And More Dedicated To Giving You Insight.

Sometimes You Just Have To Try, Even If You Know It Won’t Work.

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.

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.

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

When You're The Ones In The Life Raft And You Have Four Or Five Women In The Life Raft Who Put It Together, By The End Of It Your Nerves Are Blown. The People You're Going To Attack Are The People Who Are Helping You, Who You Are Holding It Together With.

God Bless Perseverance. Because It's Not Easy.

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

And Because Love, Real Love, Is Not So Easily Shed.

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