Quotes from Junot Diaz

Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they're asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power.

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

It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.

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

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

I read a book a week, man. And I don't have a great memory, but I have a good memory about what I read.

I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.

I am a person who dreads any kind of public exposure and any kind of public event. I spend all day, if I have to do a reading, preparing.

Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.

We get these lives for free. I didn't do anything to get this life, and no matter what the hardships are, it is free and, in a way, it's an extraordinary bargain.

When I enter that higher-order space that's required to write, I'm a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it's ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful.

People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.

My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place.

I'm a product of a fragmented world.

I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet.

Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.

I think 90% of my ideas evaporate because I have a terrible memory and because I seem to be committed to not scribble anything down. As soon as I write it down, my mind rejects it.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.

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.

The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are.

When I became my masked identity I was this incredible little nerd, but in the real world I had to be this tough kid from the neighborhood.

Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.