Best 318 quotes of Junot Diaz on MyQuotes

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.

Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.

And because love, real love, is not so easily shed.

And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.

...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.

An ear will never do you wrong, but I know writers who... most of the language they use is just extracted language from other languages they've read. I am a big-time reader, but I mix and match.

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

A person doesn't mourn forever.

'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.

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.

Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it.

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.

As a Dominican man, you're socialized to be a playboy. You spend a lot of time being taught that women are important, but without the really positive framework of why. You figure out quickly it's because of culo (ass). But there is a sense that it's not that simple.

As an artist you're on a journey of discovery and sometimes that journey takes a long time, doesn't subscribe to [a] train schedule, to the punch-clock. And I need to read a lot to make my pages happen.

As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality.

As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.

As for my slowness as a writer - that's been a struggle, no question. We live in a culture that values and rewards machine-speed productivity. Even the arts are expected to conform to the Taylor model of productivity.

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.

Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.

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

Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.

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.

Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.

but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

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.

Character is the plot in many ways

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.

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

[Donald] Trump is explained with the intersection of a number of things: our economic crisis, the way it's easier to blame immigrants, with the happenstance that he discovered that by bashing Latino immigrants and characterizing them as "rapists" and "murderers" and "scumbags," suddenly he's got this groundswell of support from a group of people who were raised on this vocabulary.

[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.

[Donald] Trump is what happens in America every time it feels economically and politically threatened, and it encounters the limitations of its own white supremacists practices.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

Every time you hear anyone talk about the Caribbean, whether it's Caribbeans themselves or people outside, there's always talk about women's bodies. Talk about this voluptuousness, this kind of stereotype of what a Caribbean person is. And I think these are stereotypes that even people inside the culture, we actually sometimes claim them and we're very proud.

For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.

For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.

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.

For me I was always a smart nerdy kid. I wasn't the smartest and I wasn't the nerdiest, but I was a smart nerdy kid my whole childhood, and I definitely wanted to be somehow involved with reading the rest of my life, and I came from a community, I lived in a community, I was part of a community where reading was considered completely alien.

For me, the battle isn't Hillary [Clinton] vs. [Bernie] Sanders. And I understand that for some people that's the battle. But for me, more than anything, it's stopping a Republican president.

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.

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

Honestly, connecting once at the deepest level with someone, you know, once you've done that, even if your life goes to hell, man, it was really worth living.

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

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.

I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.

I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.

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.