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My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.

Junot Diaz

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Junot Diaz
Age: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
African
Roots
Exist
Today
Reason
Made

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.
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Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.
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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 on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.
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You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.
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I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
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I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration. We fundamentally have been a culture that's been put together from the explosions of other cultures. But it's hard for us to see. We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is.
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My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.
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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.
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I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity. It's like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves.
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I've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing.
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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.
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Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.
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Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.
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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 of that.
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Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
Junot Diaz
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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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This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.
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Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.
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There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.
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You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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