Quotes from Junot Diaz

A young person, or someone who's writing in a different way - in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it's good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.

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.

I prefer the 1950s where people were like, "I'm a white supremacist, and that's who I am." Now people want to burn a cross on your lawn and call themselves not racists.

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.

There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.

I feel most like myself... after I run - I go out for five miles every morning.

I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it.

I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I'm with you I have this sense that you want something from me.

This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.

Love is the only thing - I don't want to say that "makes it bearable" - but I feel like without the possibility of love, this place would just devour us.

People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.

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

When I think about my own relationships to the women that I really loved, it feels like that love, even after we've broken up and we're no longer speaking, that love never goes away. No one told me that.

When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.

Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'

You know, I was a kid who had difficulty speaking English when I first immigrated. But in my head, when I read a book, I spoke English perfectly. No one could correct my Spanish. And I think that I retreated to books as a way, you know, to be, like, masterful in a language that was really difficult for me for many years.

When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage; when I smile folks check their wallets.

Long before the idea of multiculturalism, in public people could say almost anything to you and get away with it.

'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.

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

I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.

I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.

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.

I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.