Quotes from Junot Diaz

I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.

And because love, real love, is not so easily shed.

It's never the changes we want that change everything.

That's life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it's nothing. If you ask me I don't think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That's enough.

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.

You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you?

Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. - But your yourself sucks! - It is, lamentably, all I have.

Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones.

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.

Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.

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.

God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.

I think that if you're writing about the human condition, my God, you've got to start at base: point zero, point one, is the body.

New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.

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.

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.

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.

Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a We.

Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.

I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field.