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I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.

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
Matter
Deficiencies
Hard
Deficiency
Writing
Dude
Trying
Talented
Work
Privilege
Long
Term
Hands
Women
Wring

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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I think what happened to me was that I was always being taught to look, but one day I started to see. And it was because a lot of women in my life were refusing just to be looked at, to be this passive figure.
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Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
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I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.
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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.
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People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.
Junot Diaz
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Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.
Junot Diaz
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I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.
Junot Diaz
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The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.
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We can speculate. Last time I checked, the future doesn't take my advice.
Junot Diaz
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Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.
Junot Diaz
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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
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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.
Junot Diaz
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Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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We know story collections end when they end, as well - the pages serving as a countdown - but nevertheless the standard story anthology hews closer to what makes being human so hard: it reminds you with each story how quickly everything we are, everything we call our lives can change, can be upended, can disappear. Never to return.
Junot Diaz
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My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place.
Junot Diaz
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You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it? There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It's just a matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.
Junot Diaz
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I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.
Junot Diaz