Quotes from Junot Diaz

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

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable.

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.

I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood.

I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.

I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.

I wrote my first sucio story, as I call them, in 1997. This was always my 'cheater's book,' my book about sucios desgraciados. My plan was to write a book about how people deal with love and loss.

I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.

And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

The half-life of love is forever.

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.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it? There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It's just a matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.

Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.

sometimes a start is all we ever get.

I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.

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

This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.