Junot Diaz Quotes

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Junot Diaz

Profession : Writer

Birth : December 31, 1968

I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.

Junot Diaz

When I got heartbroken at 20, it just felt like someone had spiraled a football right into my skull. At 40, it feels like someone had driven a 757 right through me.

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

Let me tell you, if I could write one-tenth as fast as some of my friends, I'd be made. I'd be it. But instead I happen to be, in the tree of life of writers, down at the bottom, with the hematodes.

Junot Diaz

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.

Junot Diaz

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

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

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

Junot Diaz

I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.

Junot Diaz

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

Junot Diaz

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Junot Diaz

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

I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

Junot Diaz

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

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

Junot Diaz