Junot Diaz Quotes

I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.

As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality.

Character is the plot in many ways

The world should always be concerned whenever a vast human rights violation occurs anywhere on the planet.

We all have a blind spot and it's shaped exactly like us.

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.

You think people hate a fat person? Try a fat person who's trying to get thin.

I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.

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.

Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'

Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.

Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number.

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?

Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.

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.

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.

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.

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.

but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.

I am a person who dreads any kind of public exposure and any kind of public event. I spend all day, if I have to do a reading, preparing.

Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.

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.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments.

That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.

I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.

I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.

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.

Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.

Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.

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.

I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.

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 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.

I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.

I love “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” That was like the only black book we read in high school...

I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.

My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.

'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.

New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.

My father was a trigamist; he supported three families. We were never not poor.

To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.

My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power.

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.

- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. - But your yourself sucks! - It is, lamentably, all I have.

Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.

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

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.

You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.

...one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.