Quote

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 N.Y.C. - so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first.

Junot Diaz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Junot Diaz
Age: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Always
Comes
Given
Three
Dominican
Place
Settings
Firsts
Republic
Book
Setting
First
Perspective
Work
Books

More quotes by Junot Diaz

Image
Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.
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
Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number.
Junot Diaz
Image
She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.
Junot Diaz
Image
Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
Junot Diaz
Image
Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
Junot Diaz
Image
Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
Junot Diaz
Image
Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.
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
Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.
Junot Diaz
Image
For me, the battle isn't Hillary [Clinton] vs. [Bernie] Sanders. And I understand that for some people that's the battle. But for me, more than anything, it's stopping a Republican president.
Junot Diaz
Image
What a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are).
Junot Diaz
Image
Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
Junot Diaz
Image
It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.
Junot Diaz
Image
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.
Junot Diaz
Image
I always think about myself as a writer that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.
Junot Diaz
Image
Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in.
Junot Diaz
Image
In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.
Junot Diaz
Image
My thing is every generation of Americans has to answer what we call the 'Superman Question.' Superman comes, lands in America. He's illegal. He's one of these kids. He's wrapped up in a red bullfighter's cape. And you've got to decide what we're gonna do with Superman.
Junot Diaz
Image
Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.
Junot Diaz