Junot Diaz Quotes

213 quotes in 2609 categories

• 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…
• I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.
• I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth…
• I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.
• I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
• I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.
• I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
• I love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school.
• I mean, I'm an artist by nature; no one considers what I do and no one knows who the heck I am, but that anybody…
• I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
• I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.
• I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
• 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.
• I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.
• I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.
• I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.
• I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.
• I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
• I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
• It took me sixteen years to write.

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