Junot Diaz Quotes

Author Image

Junot Diaz

Profession : Writer

Birth : December 31, 1968

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

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.

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

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.

Junot Diaz

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

Junot Diaz

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

Junot Diaz

To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.

Junot Diaz

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

Junot Diaz

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

Junot Diaz

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

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

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

Junot Diaz

'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

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

I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it.

Junot Diaz

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.

Junot Diaz

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

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

Junot Diaz

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

Junot Diaz