Junot Diaz Quotes

213 quotes in 2609 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible…
• People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows…
• God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.
• My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.
• Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.
• Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
• 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…
• I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field.
• I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments.
• To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.
• Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
• 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…
• Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
• Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
• Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.
• Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.
• I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.

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