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Books Quotes by Junot Diaz

54 Books quotes by Junot Diaz

All Books quotes Junot Diaz’s page

A torn book on the floor shows how reading can survive even harsh moments. He points out that books are surprisingly resilient despite screens, and that a novel can imagine a future after a big disaster. He also likes to mix short‑story and novel styles in one work.

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

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“Read more than you write, live more than you read”

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I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.

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“Baby, you say, baby this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.”

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I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.

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Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.

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Literature is less involved in giving you answers and more dedicated to giving you insight.

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I read a book a week, man. And I don't have a great memory, but I have a good memory about what…

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'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.

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Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes…

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“We’re committed to the idea that a book has to live in the present . . . but the reality, that’s hard for us to recognise,…

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

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It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you…

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

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In '94, I started writing a novel about an enormous terrorist act that destroyed the United States. The novel takes place twenty…

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I really am a believer that 99.99% of all the stories we need, not only as artists but as human beings, not…

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Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read…

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When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted…

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I think that most of my writer friends are really compulsive. I think that's great. It's wonderful for them. It's just not…

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My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page…

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A form wherein we can enjoy simultaneously what is best in both the novel and the short story form. My plan was…

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I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly…

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In my mind what novels do best is that they immerse us deeply into our character's world - they truly transport us…

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Books are surviving in this intense, fragmented, hyper-accelerated present, and my sense and hope is that things will slow down again and…

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Usually at the end of each story we're thrown clear out of the story's world and then we're given a new world…

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“I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: ‘A Stronger Loving World'. To…

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“Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book: When all of…

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“In the nine years since [Robert] Harris’s novel [Conclave] was published our culture has, if anything, become more enamored with certainty, not…

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“You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda.…

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“He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater's guide to love. You think? I…

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“Better minds have said it before, but I don’t mind repeating it less well again and again: Reading, like the natural world,…

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“Because that’s the thing about reading / books. For all their vulnerabilities and lack of pull relative to screens, reading / books…

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“You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda.”

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“Magda was reading a book by a Trappist, in a better mood, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed,…

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I love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school.

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If you really want a prize, or if you really want applause, you should try to write as many books as humanly…

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In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to…

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We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced…

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'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence…

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Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking…

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More by Junot Diaz

It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican…

Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love…

It took me sixteen years to write.

You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it? There are many formulas. One year for every year…

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…

The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it…

“I used to think those were the barrio rules, Latinos and blacks in, whites out —a place we down cats weren’t supposed to go.…

“I put my hand on her knee. I just wish you'd say you love me.”

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…

“Called her a whore and attacked her walls, tearing down her posters and throwing her books everywhere. I found out because some whitegirl ran…

You're Dominican only if you do this, this, and that. And if you do this and that, you'll be accepted to a certain degree…

“Ramfis fled the country after Trujillo's death, lived dissolutely off his father's swag, and ended up dying in a car crash of his own…

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.

“If you ask me I don't think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That's enough.”

The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.