Junot Díaz
31 quotes
Biography
"Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one."
"If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge."
"That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough."
"She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life."
"In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book."
"Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either."
"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."[Becoming a Writer/ The List, O Magazine, November 2009]"
"You can't regret the life you didn't lead."
"Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often."
"Dude, you don't want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten."
"This life takes a lot more courage than I ever gave it credit for. When I was growing up around here I was always fantasizing heroic shit without realizing that what was shaping up was going to be the greatest heroic adventure of them all: trying to live and be a decent human being. That shit takes more courage than I ever had."
"I grew up in a world, [a] very New Jersey, American, Dominican, immigrant, African-American, Latino world. And, you know, I went to school and it was basically the same. I went to college; it was basically the same, where largely I wasn't really encouraged to imagine women as fully human. 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. And so I think that a lot of guys, part of our journey is wrestling with, coming to face, our limited imagina[tion] and growing in a way that allows us not only to imagine women as fully human, but to imagine the things that we do to women — that we often do blithely, without thinking, we just sort of shrug off — as actually deeply troubling and as hurting another human being. And this seems like the simplest thing. A lot of people are like, 'Really, that's like a huge leap of knowledge, of the imagination?' But for a lot of guys, that is."
"Our visions of an immigrant community and an immigrant experience are highly moralistic. I feel like our reality is William Gibson meets Toni Morrison, yet the way we’re interpreting the morality of immigrants is Chaucer.”"
"We live in a patriarchal imaginary where men cannot conceptualise women as fully human. What’s really important is how this shit resides in us, how this just lives in us, man, even if we’re the good guy – it should give a motherfucker pause."
"If you think learning salsa is your future, you’re going to be pretty insufferable in salsa classes."
"Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over."
"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.", O Magazine, November 2009]"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer--the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life or death."
"I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart."
"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 an"
"What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy."
"if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves."