Junot Diaz Quotes & Sayings

I mean, look, we're living in a country where you can't have a non-denominational response. If you're slightly critical of either party, all of the partisans jump on you like you're a lunatic. — Junot Diaz

I've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing. — Junot Diaz

They were all on the volleyball team together and tall and fit as colts and when they went for runs it was what the track team might have looked like in terrorist heaven. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

A particularly Jersey malaise
the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

They sounded a lot like me and my old girlfriend Loretta, but I swore to myself that I would stop thinking about her ass, even though every Cleopatra-looking Latina in the city made me stop and wish she would come back to me. — Junot Diaz

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

Called her a whore and attacked her walls, tearing down her posters and throwing her books everywhere. I found out because some whitegirl ran up and said, Excuse me, but your stupid roommate is going insane, and I had to bolt upstairs and put him in a headlock. — Junot Diaz

If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

But I believe that, once the shock settles, faith and energy will return. Because let's be real: we always knew this shit wasn't going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. We have to keep fighting, because otherwise there will be no future - all will be consumed. Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting, against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same. This is the joyous destiny of our people - to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone. — Junot Diaz

People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it. — Junot Diaz

People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

Literature is less involved in giving you answers and more dedicated to giving you insight. — Junot Diaz

Knocked the architecture right out of his legs. — Junot Diaz

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons. — Junot Diaz

But it's clear to me that us slow-poke writers are a dying breed. It's amazing how thoroughly my young writing students have internalized the new machine rhythm, the rush many of my young writers are in to publish. The majority don't want to sit on a book for four, five years. The majority don't want to listen to the silence inside and outside for their artistic imprimatur. The majority want to publish fast, publish now. — Junot Diaz

One Ring. Like stumbling into — Junot Diaz

We were about to hit the door when she returned, panting, an envelope of cold around her.
Where did you go? I asked.
I went for a walk. She dropped her coat at the door; her face was red from the cold and she was breathing deeply, as if she'd sprinted the last thirty steps.
Where?
Just around the corner.
Why the hell did you do that?
She started to cry, and when Rafa put his hand on her waist, she slapped it away. We went back to our room.
I think she's losing it, I said.
She's just lonely, Rafa said. — Junot Diaz

I find infidelity interesting because it's so revelatory about people. It's this really silent thing. Everyone acknowledges it as a general practice, but nobody likes to go beyond that, to get down to the nitty-gritty. — Junot Diaz

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

The half-life of love is forever. — Junot Diaz

She blew out of the Terrace sometime before Christmas to points unknown. The Gujarati guy told me when I ran into him at the Pathmark. He was still pissed because Pura had stiffed him almost two months' rent.
Last time I ever rent to one of you people.
Amen, I said. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

Any woman who laughs as dope as she does won't ever have trouble finding men. — Junot Diaz

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

God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy. — Junot Diaz

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. 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.
[Becoming a Writer/ The List, O Magazine, November 2009] — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

I read a book a week, man. And I don't have a great memory, but I have a good memory about what I read. — Junot Diaz

I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category. — Junot Diaz

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 — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy. — Junot Diaz

Blur trying to shy away from the camera. I listen to her advice and on my way to and from work I concentrate on the other — Junot Diaz

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

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. — Junot Diaz

Before we even swung onto 516 Nilda was in my brother's lap and he had his hand so far up her skirt it looked like he was performing a surgical procedure. When we were getting off the bus Rafa pulled me aside and held his hand in front of my nose. Smell this, he said. This is what's wrong with women. — Junot Diaz

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

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

You go to more doctors. You celebrate Arlenny's Ph.D. defense. And then one June night you scribble the ex's name and: The half life of love is forever. — Junot Diaz

The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are. — Junot Diaz

I came to New York because I was fleeing from the double-wide baby stroller, from the culture of respectability of the bourgeois suburban middle class. And my dream is that the elements of New York that are vital - the elements that are artistic, that are alternative, that resist capital, that are humane - not only endure but thrive, and maybe they do some sort of aikido reversal. They take [diversity-killing trends] and fucking slam them on their heads. — Junot Diaz

Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you. — Junot Diaz

Revenge is living well, without you. — Junot Diaz

Travel light, was all she ever said about the house when he suggested he buy her a lamp or anything, and he suspected that she would have said the same thing about having more friends. — Junot Diaz

These days I have to ask myself: What made me angrier? That Oscar, the fat loser, quit, or that Oscar, the fat loser, defied me? And I wonder: What hurt him more? That I was never really his friend, or that I pretended to be? — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

Freezing out," she said. She had her gloves in one hand like a crumpled bouquet. — Junot Diaz

The only way out is in. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those. — Junot Diaz

I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families. — Junot Diaz

Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number ... — Junot Diaz

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

A month later the law student leaves you for one of her classmates, tells you that it was great but she has to start being realistic ... Later you see her with said classmate on the Yard. He's even lighter than you but he still looks unquestionably black. He's also like nine feet tall and put together like an anatomy primer. They are walking hand in hand and she looks so very happy that you try to find the space in your heart not to begrudge her. — Junot Diaz

I am a hard man to replace. — Junot Diaz

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

I'm of African descent and my sister looks completely black, but I didn't look black. I was the super-nerdy kid who was also willing to fight. — Junot Diaz

He had secret loves all over town, the kind of curly-haired big-bodied girls who wouldn't have said boo to a loser like him but about whom he could not stop dreaming. — Junot Diaz

Jesus, Oscar, Rudolfo said nervously. You look like they put a shirt on a turd, — Junot Diaz

What else she doesn't know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again. — Junot Diaz

For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature. — Junot Diaz

The world, you tell yourself, will never end. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

It took me sixteen years to write. — Junot Diaz

Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women. — Junot Diaz

Ask any of your elders and they will tell you: Trujillo might have been a dictator, but, he was a Dominican dictator, which is another way of saying he was the number-one bellaco in the country. — Junot Diaz

I feel most like myself ... after I run - I go out for five miles every morning. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

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

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

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. — Junot Diaz

We hurt each other too well to let it drop — Junot Diaz

I doubt that I can speak for all Dominican men but I doubt they can either. — Junot Diaz

Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life. — Junot Diaz

She didn't seem to mind being the girl you called every couple of months at eleven at night, just to see what she was "up to." As much relationship as she could handle. — Junot Diaz

It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked. — Junot Diaz

I know what it means to be moved by a book in my body so much that I go looking for its analog in the real world.
[From an interview with Complex magazine, 12/2012] — Junot Diaz

We're clocks, Abelard. Nothing more. — Junot Diaz

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in. — Junot Diaz

I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading ... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get. — Junot Diaz

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

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. — Junot Diaz

I think 90% of my ideas evaporate because I have a terrible memory and because I seem to be committed to not scribble anything down. As soon as I write it down, my mind rejects it. — Junot Diaz

And in the gloaming of her dwindling strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she'd not even had her own name — Junot Diaz

Anger has a way of returning. — Junot Diaz

What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they've had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Deathstroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that's too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like. — Junot Diaz

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture — Junot Diaz

Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn't have passed for Normal if he'd wanted to. — Junot Diaz

Elsewhere called the Strom Thurmond Maneuver.) Pujols of course blamed Beli for everything. Sat in the office of the rector and — Junot Diaz

But this isn't human! When has this country ever been human, Abelard? You're the historian. You of all people should know that. — Junot Diaz

And the roaches. The roaches were so bold in his flat that turning on the lights did not startle them. They waved their three-inch antennas as if to say, Hey, puto, turn that shit off. — Junot Diaz

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

She seemed tired and watched the world outside like maybe she was expecting it to speak to her. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

For my first three books the setting (or place if you will) has always been a given - N.J. and the Dominican Republic and some N.Y.C. - so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first. — Junot Diaz