Quotes from Junot Diaz

The only way out is in.

Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.

Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.

Honestly, connecting once at the deepest level with someone, you know, once you've done that, even if your life goes to hell, man, it was really worth living.

The thing is, you try your best, and what else you got? You try your best, really, that's all you can do. And for me, my best happens really so rarely.

In minority communities there's a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There's a misunderstanding of what an artist does.

'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.

I really am a believer that 99.99% of all the stories we need, not only as artists but as human beings, not only as writers but as readers, haven't been written yet. Certainly haven't been published yet.

I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments.

Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.

Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.

I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.

I think men spend so much time passing for being men.

I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.

John Carter was also one of our first recognizable superhumans and there is little doubt that his extraordinary physical feats inspired Superman's creators. Remember: before Superman could fly or turn back time, he was nothing less than an earthbound crime-fighting John Carter in tights.

I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films.

[Donald] Trump is what happens in America every time it feels economically and politically threatened, and it encounters the limitations of its own white supremacists practices.

You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods.

I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.

Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.

An ear will never do you wrong, but I know writers who... most of the language they use is just extracted language from other languages they've read. I am a big-time reader, but I mix and match.