Junot Diaz quotes

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

#Running #Years #Way

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

#Betrayal #People #Infidelity

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

#Real #Grateful #Mit

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

#Anxiety #Trying #Sometimes

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.
-- Junot Diaz

#Nice #Thinking #Average

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

#Inspirational #Writing #Views

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

#Beautiful #Stories #Painful

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That's what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma- she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you.
-- Junot Diaz

#Girl #Falling In Love #Heart

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
-- Junot Diaz

#Regret

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

#Fiction #Moments #Celebrate

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

#Glasses #Engineering #Black

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

#Color #Red #Latina

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

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

#Reflection #Monsters #Levels

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

#Art #Culture #Take Your Time

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

#Want

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

#Love #Forever #Half

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

#Real #Mentor #Done

Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in.
-- Junot Diaz

#Artist #Hurtful #Tourism

Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable.
-- Junot Diaz

#Thinking #Cities #Needs

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.
-- Junot Diaz

#Lying #Heart #Cheater

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

#Girlfriend #Loss #Giving

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

#Mean #Artist #Doe

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

#Forever

My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.
-- Junot Diaz

#Mother #Father #Care

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

#Growing Up #Nerd #Paper

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

#Girl #Couple #Fighting

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

#Mistake #Weak

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

#Memories #Giving #Migration

My thing is, I'm just way too harsh. It's an enormous impediment, and that's just the truth of it. It doesn't make me any better, make me any worse, it certainly isn't more valorous. I have a character defect, man.
-- Junot Diaz

#Character #Men #Way

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

#Book #Past #Firsts

My thing is every generation of Americans has to answer what we call the 'Superman Question.' Superman comes, lands in America. He's illegal. He's one of these kids. He's wrapped up in a red bullfighter's cape. And you've got to decide what we're gonna do with Superman.
-- Junot Diaz

#Kids #America #Land

John Carter was also one of our first recognizable superhumans and there is little doubt that his extraordinary physical feats inspired Superman's creators. Remember: before Superman could fly or turn back time, he was nothing less than an earthbound crime-fighting John Carter in tights.
-- Junot Diaz

#Fighting #Doubt #Firsts

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

#Dream #New York #Wall

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.
-- Junot Diaz

#Writing #Hands #Long

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

#Pain #Book #Writing

I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished 'Drown' was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.
-- Junot Diaz

#Dog #Jobs #Teaching

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.
-- Junot Diaz

#Stories #World #Narrative

In fact, looking at the darkest sides of the United States has only made me appreciate the things that we do right, the things that we do beautifully. We are, for all of our mistakes and all of our crimes, a remarkable place.
-- Junot Diaz

#Mistake #Appreciate #Facts

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

#Artist #Community #Knees

My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place.
-- Junot Diaz

#Country #Mistake #Responsibility

In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work.
-- Junot Diaz

#Today #Too Much #Jersey

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

#Writing #Eight #Tables

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

#Men #People #Culture

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

#Running #Stories #Novel

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

When she smiles ***** ask her for her hand in marriage; when I smile folks check their wallets.
-- Junot Diaz

#Hands #I Smile #Checks

You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it? There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It's just a matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.
-- Junot Diaz

#Love #Two #Years

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.
-- Junot Diaz

#Horse #Inspiration #Would Be

Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven—where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with—he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he'd jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge.
-- Junot Diaz

#Bridges #Play #Two

...what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-...
-- Junot Diaz

#Surprise

We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters.
-- Junot Diaz

#Dream #Book #Character

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.
-- Junot Diaz

#Morning #Pieces #Paper

On the outside, Oscar simply looked tired, no taller, no fatter, only the skin under his eyes, pouched from years of quiet desperation, had changed. Inside, he was in a world of hurt. He saw black flashes before his eyes. He saw himself falling through the air. He knew what he was turning into. He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet: an old bitter dork. Saw himself at the Game Room, picking through the miniatures for the rest of his life. He didn't want this future but he couldn't see how it could be avoided, couldn't figure his way out of it. Fukú.
-- Junot Diaz

#Hurt #Fall #Eye

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

#Men #Firsts #Adults

You whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other's arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise.
-- Junot Diaz

#Morning #Names #House

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

#Numbers #Twenties #Seven

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

#Light #House #World

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

#People #World #Way

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

#Long #Bookstores #Mets

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

#Couple #Character #Writing

There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.
-- Junot Diaz

#Real #Today #Fiction

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

#Short Love #Reading #Writing

We have a whole bunch of young people and a whole bunch of families. Are we going to disrupt these families and tear them apart? Or are we going think, like, listen - these people are here. We've got to deal with this reality. We've got to extend the franchise.
-- Junot Diaz

#Reality #Thinking #People

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

#Mean #Asking Questions #Long

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

#Book #Ideas #Infidelity

When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That's what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live.
-- Junot Diaz

#Struggle #Writing #Order

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

#Book #Kids #Thinking

Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.
-- Junot Diaz

#Love You #Said

Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.
-- Junot Diaz

#Beautiful #Art #Mean

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

#Bullying #Hate #Thinking