Quote

In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

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
Ever
Cheater
Sometimes
Bend
Feels
Follow
Heart
Months
Work
Grace
Like
Start
Lying
Hope

More quotes by 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
You can't be a human without seeing.
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
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.
Junot Diaz
Image
We can speculate. Last time I checked, the future doesn't take my advice.
Junot Diaz
Image
This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.
Junot Diaz
Image
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
Image
She had reason to doubt him he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.
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
Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.
Junot Diaz
Image
I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.
Junot Diaz
Image
Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for.
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
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
Image
You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.
Junot Diaz
Image
I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
Junot Diaz
Image
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.
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
I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.
Junot Diaz
Image
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