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. – Junot Diaz
For my first three books the setting (or place if you will) has always been a given – N.J. and the Dominican Republic and some N.Y.C. – so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
I think there’s something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn’t want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived. – Junot Diaz
When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That’s what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you’re not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain’t different or original. – Junot Diaz
Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I’m deeply grateful for. – Junot Diaz
I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn’t write. For me, I’d die if I couldn’t read. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
I can always tell if someone’s from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
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. – 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. – Junot Diaz
It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don’t find out you’re an artist because you do something really well. – Junot Diaz
For me it’s a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe. – Junot Diaz
I do think that we all draw limits and I feel like part of the work of an artist is it shouldn’t be fun. This shouldn’t be comfortable. I’m not looking to make people feel unsafe, but I am looking to make people feel uncomfortable. – Junot Diaz
Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship – it’s all one person speaking. – Junot Diaz
‘Oscar Wao’ for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz