Quote

I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.

Junot Diaz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Junot Diaz
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Resources
Pieces
Write
Writing
Work
Make
Summon
Sorts
Slowly

More quotes by Junot Diaz

Image
I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
Junot Diaz
Image
'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.
Junot Diaz
Image
I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.
Junot Diaz
Image
Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'
Junot Diaz
Image
That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
Junot Diaz
Image
I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.
Junot Diaz
Image
The half-life of love is forever.
Junot Diaz
Image
I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.
Junot Diaz
Image
I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
Junot Diaz
Image
Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.
Junot Diaz
Image
We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way.
Junot Diaz
Image
I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished Drown was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.
Junot Diaz
Image
Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.
Junot Diaz
Image
When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.
Junot Diaz
Image
I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other time I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it's all wrong. I'm sorry, he'll say. I have to leave now.
Junot Diaz
Image
...one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.
Junot Diaz
Image
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.
Junot Diaz
Image
Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
Junot Diaz
Image
For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.
Junot Diaz
Image
Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.
Junot Diaz