Quote

Privilege does not operate without silence.

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
Privilege
Silence
Doe
Without
Operate

More quotes by Junot Diaz

Image
Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.
Junot Diaz
Image
Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.
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
Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
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
New Jersey is to New York what Santo Domingo is to the United States. I always felt that those two landscapes, not only just the landscapes themselves but their relationships to what we would call 'a center' or 'the center of the universe,' has in some ways defined my artistic and critical vision.
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
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
'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.
Junot Diaz
Image
If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original.
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've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy.
Junot Diaz
Image
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
Image
A person doesn't mourn forever.
Junot Diaz
Image
I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
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
I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
Junot Diaz
Image
Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory you won't see it often.
Junot Diaz
Image
Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.
Junot Diaz
Image
As an artist you're on a journey of discovery and sometimes that journey takes a long time, doesn't subscribe to [a] train schedule, to the punch-clock. And I need to read a lot to make my pages happen.
Junot Diaz