Junot Diaz Quotes

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.

I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.

The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.

Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves

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.

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

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.

[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.

The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.

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.

As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.

I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.

She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.

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

I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'

I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet.

And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.

For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.

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.

It's never the changes we want that change everything.

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.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.

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.

I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.

It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.

Stereotypes, they're sensual, cultural weapons. That's the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing.

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.

The idea that America has cornered the market on anti-immigration is ridiculous. It's a global phenomenon.

The greatest myth of all is what America is. I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration.

Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.

'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.

Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones.

Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.

This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.

The half-life of love is forever.

[The biggest disappointment is] that he [Barack Obama] deported everybody and their grandmother.

I think men spend so much time passing for being men.

A person doesn't mourn forever.

I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.

If you really want a prize, or if you really want applause, you should try to write as many books as humanly possible.

I find reading to be a delight, a source of comfort, a way to explore.

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.

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.

And because love, real love, is not so easily shed.

Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertibe knowledge that she will never forgive you.

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.

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.