"It's just this epidemic unimportance, this pervasive feeling that just about everything is "no big deal," that drives these ordinary people to those fast-food joints, there to try to fill with carbohydrates the spiritual and emotional emptiness gnawing inside them."

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The second book, which was probably more from a professional standpoint - when I read Junot Díaz's Drown, I was like, Oh my god, you can write these stories and people will actually read them beyond your own little community. This guy's book is blowing up and it seems like [he's writing about] the neighborhood that I grew up in. That was a big deal. I read that in graduate school, so that's when I was really taking writing seriously, but I didn't know you could do it. I didn't know you can actually be an author. It was a weird epiphany.

— Matt de la Pena