In minority communities there’s a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There’s a misunderstanding of what an artist does. – Junot Diaz
Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don’t feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family. – Junot Diaz
Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we’re always lacking something. – Junot Diaz
I guess I’m just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments. – Junot Diaz
You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. – Junot Diaz
Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That’s the nature of genre. – Junot Diaz
I’m of African descent and my sister looks completely black, but I didn’t look black. I was the super-nerdy kid who was also willing to fight. – Junot Diaz
The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it’s the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it’s the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it’s the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
One of the many characteristics of the new is that, at first, it’s very hard to recognize it for what it is. We’re lucky if we recognize something as being new when it first appears. Usually I think we don’t have that privilege. It’s usually after the fact that we suddenly turn around and say, ‘Wow, this thing is amazing.’ – Junot Diaz
I’m still trying to figure out how to write about cancer and my family’s experience with it. If I had been able to write ‘The Pura Principle’ back in those days, I’m positive it would have had no humor in it. Which means the story would have been false. – Junot Diaz
I don’t think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse. – Junot Diaz
I didn’t start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that. – Junot Diaz
I think the average guy thinks they’re pro-woman, just because they think they’re a nice guy and someone has told them that they’re awesome. But the truth is far from it. – Junot Diaz
‘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. – Junot Diaz
To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail. – Junot Diaz
I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am. – Junot Diaz
Even I thought I would be a writer who put something out every year. But that’s not how it worked out. – 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. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That’s just the truth of it. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
I love ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X.’ That was like the only black book we read in high school. – Junot Diaz