Junot Diaz quotes - page 7

Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer best known for his novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." His work explores themes of identity, immigration, and the Dominican-American experience. He has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Here are 199 of his quotes:

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)

My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power.

Junot Diaz

My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.

Junot Diaz

It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don't find out you're an artist because you do something really well.

Junot Diaz

I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.

Junot Diaz

I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished 'Drown' was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.

Junot Diaz

I mean, I'm an artist by nature; no one considers what I do and no one knows who the heck I am, but that anybody does - it is astonishing.

Junot Diaz

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

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

I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

Junot Diaz

Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous. (Junot Diaz)

So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.

Junot Diaz

I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.

Junot Diaz

Anger has a way of returning.

Junot Diaz

Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.

Junot Diaz

Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.

Junot Diaz

My thing is every generation of Americans has to answer what we call the 'Superman Question.' Superman comes, lands in America. He's illegal. He's one of these kids. He's wrapped up in a red bullfighter's cape. And you've got to decide what we're gonna do with Superman.

Junot Diaz

The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.

Junot Diaz

'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.

Junot Diaz

I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.

Junot Diaz

You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there. (Junot Diaz)

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

For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.

Junot Diaz

What else she doesn't know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.

Junot Diaz

Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.

Junot Diaz

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Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz - Image

Photo: Photo by Christopher Peterson, CC BY-SA 3.0

Occupation: American Writer
Born: December 31, 1968
Quotes count: 199

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