Junot Quotes & Sayings

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. — Junot Diaz

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

But most of all books (I say again and again) are like the Thirty-Mile Woman from Toni Morrison's Beloved: 'She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.' ~ Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. — Leah Price

The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book. — Junot Diaz

In minority communities there's a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There's a misunderstanding of what an artist does. — Junot Diaz

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one. — Junot Diaz

She watched hungrily for visitors from out of town, threw open her arms at the slightest hint of a wind and at night she struggled Jacob-like against the ocean pressing down on her. — Junot Diaz

You breathe nonstop, like a marathon runner, but it doesn't help. — 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

He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up. — Junot Diaz

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened - and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars? - Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

People like her got addictive personalities. You don't want to be catching that. — Junot Diaz

A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things. — Junot Diaz

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

Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years. — Junot Diaz

Student today don't mean na', but in a Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the Fall of Arbenz, by the Stoning of Nixon, by the Guerrillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs - in a Latin America already a year and half into the Decade of the Guerrilla - a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a vibrating quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. — Junot Diaz

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

I don't remember her name, but I do remember how her perm shone in the glow of our night-light. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

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

I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood. — Junot Diaz

There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier ... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way. — Junot Diaz

I do think that we all draw limits and I feel like part of the work of an artist is it shouldn't be fun. This shouldn't be comfortable. I'm not looking to make people feel unsafe, but I am looking to make people feel uncomfortable. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

On one DR trip you drive up to La Vega and put her name out there. You show a picture, too, like a private eye. It is of the two of you, the one time you went to the beach, to Sandy Hook. Both of you are smiling. Both of you blinked. — Junot Diaz

I was seventeen and a half, smoking so much bud that if I remembered an hour from any one of those days it would have been a lot. — Junot Diaz

Hail, Dog of God, was how he welcomed me my first day in Demarest. Took a week before I figured out what the hell he meant. God. Domini. Dog. Canis. Hail, Dominicanis. — 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

Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for. — Junot Diaz

She wanted to talk about unimportant matters, to speak to someone who wasn't her child or her spouse. — Junot Diaz

A person doesn't mourn forever. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

Usually at the end of each story we're thrown clear out of the story's world and then we're given a new world to enter. What's unique about a linked collection is that it can deliver both sets of narrative pleasures - the novel's long immersion into character-world and the story anthology's energetic (and mortal) brevity - the linked collection is unique in its ability to be both abrupt and longitudinal simultaneously. — Junot Diaz

No one, alas, more oppressive than the oppressed. — Junot Diaz

And because love, real love, is not so easily shed. — Junot Diaz

Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. (Junot Diaz) — Carolina De Robertis

You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest. — Junot Diaz

Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel. — Junot Diaz

A form wherein we can enjoy simultaneously what is best in both the novel and the short story form. My plan was to create a book that affords readers some of the novel's long-form pleasures but that also contains the short story's ability to capture what is so difficult about being human - the brevity of our moments, their cruel irrevocability. — Junot Diaz

I watched commercial ave. slide past and there in the distance were the lights of route 18. that was one of those moments that would always be Rutgers for me. — Junot Diaz

It took me sixteen years to write. — Junot Diaz

Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own. — Junot Diaz

The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection. — Junot Diaz

They would be able to tell. Even the most bruto would see the death in your eyes. — Junot Diaz

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

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

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

To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs. — Junot Diaz

I sort through piles of sheets with gloved hands. The dirties are brought down by orderlies, morenas mostly. I never see the sick; they visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets, the alphabet of the sick and dying. A lot of the time the stains are too deep and I have to throw these linens in the special hamper. One of the girls from Baitoa tells me she's heard that everything in the hamper gets incinerated. Because of the sida, she whispers. Sometimes the stains are rusty and old and sometimes the blood smells sharp as rain. You'd think, given the blood we see, that there's a great war going on out in the world. Just — Junot Diaz

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

I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever. — Junot Diaz

...sometimes a start is all we ever get. — Junot Diaz

You can't be a human without seeing. — Junot Diaz

I seem to be allergic to diligence — Junot Diaz

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. — 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

How much English do you know? None, Papi said after a moment. Eulalio shook his head. Papi met Eulalio last and liked him least. — 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

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

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

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. — Junot Diaz

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper. — Junot Diaz

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

You hear mothers say all the time that they would die for their children, but my mom never said shit like that. She didn't have to. When it came to my brother, it was written across her face in 112-point Tupac Gothic. — Junot Diaz

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

I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain
abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer
the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life or death. — 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

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

Men can be unjust towards me, my dear Junot,' he wrote to his faithful aide-de-camp, 'but it suffices to be innocent; my conscience is the tribunal before which I call my conduct. — Andrew Roberts

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

Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.' — Junot Diaz

Never had the opportunity in her first lost childhood; and in the intervening years her desire for it had doubled over and doubled over like a katana being forged until finally it was sharper than the truth. — Junot Diaz

I already told you it's over, he snaps. What else do you want? A maldito corpse? You women never know how to leave things alone. You never know how to let go. — Junot Diaz

You had an elaborate system that you thought would keep us out of bed: you sat on the other side of the room, you didn't let me crack your knuckles, you never stayed more than fifteen minutes. It never really worked, did it? — Junot Diaz

Only Puerto Rican girl on the earth who wouldn't give up the ass for any reason. I can't, she said. I can't make any mistakes ... Paloma was convinced that if she made any mistakes in the next two years, any mistakes at all, she would be stuck in that family of hers forever. That was her nightmare. Imagine if I don't get in anywhere, she said. You'd still have me, you tried to reassure her, but Paloma looked at you like the apocalypse would be preferable. — Junot Diaz

One of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away. — Junot Diaz

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

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

Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her. — Junot Diaz

You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods. — Junot Diaz

I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work. — Junot Diaz

We all know that there are language forms that are considered impolite and out of order, no matter what truths these languages might be carrying. If you talk with a harsh, urbanized accent and you use too many profanities, that will often get you barred from many arenas, no matter what you're trying to say. On the other hand, polite, formal language is allowed almost anywhere even when all it is communicating is hatred and violence. Power always privileges its own discourse while marginalizing those who would challenge it or that are the victims of its power. — Junot Diaz

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

Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him. — Junot Diaz

I was really drawn to thinking about the women in my life. Thinking about my mother, who's a very powerful force on me. And I have these two very strong sisters who took up a lot of imaginary space in my life. — 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

We didn't know it was the last days but we should have. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life. — 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

With the sun sliding out of the sky like spit off a wall ... — Junot Diaz

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

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

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

Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either. — Junot Diaz

She was one of those golden mulatas that French-speaking Caribbeans call chabines, that my boys call chicas de oro; she had snarled, apocalyptic hair, copper eyes, and was one whiteskinned relative away from jaba. — 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