Junot Diaz Quotes

Stereotypes, they’re sensual, cultural weapons. That’s the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing.

New Jersey is to New York what Santo Domingo is to the United States. I always felt that those two landscapes, not only just the landscapes themselves but their relationships to what we would call ‘a center‘ or ‘the center of the universe,’ has in some ways defined my artistic and critical vision.

I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they’re threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.

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.

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.

So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.

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.

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.

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

I’m sure I’m one of those undiagnosed people with social anxiety.

I’m a product of a fragmented world.

I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field.

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

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.

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.

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.

Even I thought I would be a writer who put something out every year. But that’s not how it worked out.

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

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

I’ve always thought that you don’t love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it’s done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it’s beautiful and that it’s worthy.

I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it’s not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the ’80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I’d fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films.

Even if you didn’t come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who’s either going to college, shifting towns.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I’m an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.

I look most like myself… when I’m wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.

It’s extraordinary how many people read a book that’s new and weird and befriend it.

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

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.

Spin is ‘something is beautiful because we say it’s beautiful.’

I don’t think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.

I act most like myself… when I’m in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.

A young person, or someone who’s writing in a different way – in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it’s good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.

When I enter that higher-order space that’s required to write, I’m a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it’s ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful.

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 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.

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.

I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn’t write. For me, I’d die if I couldn’t read.

Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world – that’s pretty marvelous.

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

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

Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That’s the nature of genre.

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.

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

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.

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.

‘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.

I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn’t have a safe category.

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.

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

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

I really am a believer that 99.99% of all the stories we need, not only as artists but as human beings, not only as writers but as readers, haven‘t been written yet. Certainly haven’t been published yet.

I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.

It took me sixteen years to write.

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

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.

‘A Princess of Mars‘ may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.

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.

Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship – it’s all one person speaking.

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.

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