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but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.

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
Heart
Every
Like
Eating
Days
Alone
Back
Firsts
First

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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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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When you're the ones in the life raft and you have four or five women in the life raft who put it together, by the end of it your nerves are blown. The people you're going to attack are the people who are helping you, who you are holding it together with.
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If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other's oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble.
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I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.
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It took me sixteen years to write.
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I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.
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Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.
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In fact, looking at the darkest sides of the United States has only made me appreciate the things that we do right, the things that we do beautifully. We are, for all of our mistakes and all of our crimes, a remarkable place.
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Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.
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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.
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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.
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Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory you won't see it often.
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My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.
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What a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are).
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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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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.
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In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.
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As a Dominican man, you're socialized to be a playboy. You spend a lot of time being taught that women are important, but without the really positive framework of why. You figure out quickly it's because of culo (ass). But there is a sense that it's not that simple.
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I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
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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.
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