Quote

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

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
Would
Mysterious
Understood
Maybe
Write
Art
Writing
Really

More quotes by Junot Diaz

Image
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
Image
Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
Junot Diaz
Image
The half-life of love is forever.
Junot Diaz
Image
I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
Junot Diaz
Image
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.
Junot Diaz
Image
I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Junot Diaz
Image
Now people like Susan Sarandon are noticing that people of color live this way?! This is the way I've always lived! What's happened is that it has now reached a level of national discourse where it's on the table. But they've never minded that we were treated like this off-stage.
Junot Diaz
Image
She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.
Junot Diaz
Image
You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
Junot Diaz
Image
She's applying her lipstick I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.
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
The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.
Junot Diaz
Image
New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
Junot Diaz
Image
I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
Junot Diaz
Image
It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
Junot Diaz
Image
My father was a trigamist he supported three families. We were never not poor.
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
I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.
Junot Diaz
Image
Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number.
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