Junot Diaz Book Quotes & Sayings

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. — 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

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

It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don't find out you're an artist because you do something really well. — Junot Diaz

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book. — Junot Diaz

I'm very busy."
"The sign on the door said closed."
Finbar shook his head. "Never trust a door; they'll always lie to you. — Derek Landy

It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name ... That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still. — Frederick Buechner

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

It's extraordinary how many people read a book that's new and weird and befriend it. — Junot Diaz

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool. — Junot Diaz

Magda was reading a book by a Trappist, in a better mood, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed, fingering my useless map. — Junot Diaz

When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity. — Junot Diaz

To me, Jeff Zucker is synonymous with winning. He's an incredible news executive. — Soledad O'Brien

And yet there are other days, when I'm downtrodden or morose, when I find myself at my desk late at night, unable to sleep, flipping through (of all things) Oscar's dog-eared copy of Watchmen. One of the few things that he took with him on the Final Voyage that we recovered. The original trade. I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: "A Stronger Loving World." To the only panel he's circled. Oscar - who never defaced a book in his life - circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt's plan has succeded in "saving the world." Veidt says: "I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end." And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: "In — Junot Diaz

Why aren't you at your booth?" "She ran out of bats' testicles and hares' anuses," I piped up.
"Is it anuses or ani?" Roxy asked in an aside, looking perplexed. "You say octopi, don't you? Shouldn't more than one hare's anus be ani? — Katie MacAlister

I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones. — Junot Diaz

You could call him,' Wes suggests. 'Why be a spectator in the game of love? Take charge. Don't wait around and let the boy call all the shots.'
'As cheesy as all of that sounds,' Kimmie adds.
'Cheese or not,I know what I'm talking about.' He sulks. 'I've lived it. I've learned it.'
Kimmie lets out a laugh. 'With who,Romeo? That Wendy girl you paid to date you?'
'Oh, and because I don't have a dating history as big as your mouth, it doesn't quite measure up?'
'I hate to break this to you, but that isn't the only thing of yours that doesn't measure up.'
'Wouldn't you like to know?' He grins. — Laurie Faria Stolarz

'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both. — Junot Diaz

It is the attendance at a great meal, with one too many courses and two too many glasses of wine, that makes civilization spin, romance bloom and friendship last. — John Mariani

Books are surviving in this intense, fragmented, hyper-accelerated present, and my sense and hope is that things will slow down again and people will want more time for a contemplative life. There is no way people can keep up this pace. No one is happy. Two or three hours to read should not be an unattainable thing, although I hope we get to that stage without needing a corporate sponsored app to hold our hand. The utopian in me has my fingers crossed that we haven't quite figured out the digital future just yet. After all, the one thing we know about people: they always surprise. — Junot Diaz

But take heart: For every phalanx of nerds who die there are always a few who succeed. Not long after that horrific murder, a whole pack of revolutionary nerds ran aground on a sandbar on the southeast coast of Cuba. Yes, it was Fidel and Revolutionary Crew, back for a rematch against Batista. Of the eight-two revolutionaries who splashed ashore, only twenty-two survived to celebrate the New Year, including one book-loving argentino. A bloodbath, with Batista's forces executing even those who surrendered. But these twenty-two, it would prove, were enough. — 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 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

I love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school. — Junot Diaz

At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome. — Huston Smith

You know, I was a kid who had difficulty speaking English when I first immigrated. But in my head, when I read a book, I spoke English perfectly. No one could correct my Spanish. And I think that I retreated to books as a way, you know, to be, like, masterful in a language that was really difficult for me for many years. — Junot Diaz

I wrote my first sucio story, as I call them, in 1997. This was always my 'cheater's book,' my book about sucios desgraciados. My plan was to write a book about how people deal with love and loss. — 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