Junot Diaz Quotes

The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should’ve arrested him for it.

If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other's oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble.

Katrina was one of those things that rips the clothes off of the guy who keeps saying he's a saint, and underneath you see that he's a monster.

[Donald] Trump is explained with the intersection of a number of things: our economic crisis, the way it's easier to blame immigrants, with the happenstance that he discovered that by bashing Latino immigrants and characterizing them as "rapists" and "murderers" and "scumbags," suddenly he's got this groundswell of support from a group of people who were raised on this vocabulary.

[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.

It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

In my mind what novels do best is that they immerse us deeply into our character's world - they truly transport us deep into these spaces - but the same way you know a Hollywood movie won't end after thirty minutes, you carry in yourself the implicit contract that the novel won't throw you out of itself 'til the very end. That bulk of pages is a form of consolation, of security.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy.

As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.

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.

The half-life of love is forever.

I think that if you're writing about the human condition, my God, you've got to start at base: point zero, point one, is the body.

I love the kookiness of our speech. Speech is like wonderful magic and poetry in itself. I've always had to crib a lot from what I've heard.

Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.

The greatest myth of all is what America is. I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration.

Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number.

I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration. We fundamentally have been a culture that's been put together from the explosions of other cultures. But it's hard for us to see. We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is.

Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.

[Immigrating] didn't burn out my desire to travel, though that can happen. There's nothing like immigration to make you want to just stay put. But what I think of as home is this life between Santo Domingo and the parts of New Jersey and New York City that were my childhood, so in my mind it's like home is all those things combined.

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture

The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.

I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That's what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma- she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you.

Part of it is eight years of a black president, and white America still lost their [minds] about that. Part of it is a Republican politics of vicious, vicious partisan [stuff] that has completely poisoned what we would call the political rhetorical sphere. All of these things come together in a perfect storm.

As an artist you're on a journey of discovery and sometimes that journey takes a long time, doesn't subscribe to [a] train schedule, to the punch-clock. And I need to read a lot to make my pages happen.

[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.

I think men spend so much time passing for being men. There's a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd. But it was the thing we weren't saying, that people were afraid to say, like, "Yo, what we do is nerdy by definition."

You must learn her. You must know the reason why she is silent. You must trace her weakest spots. You must write to her. You must remind her that you are there. You must know how long it takes for her to give up. You must be there to hold her when she is about to. You must love her because many have tried and failed. And she wants to know that she is worthy to be loved, that she is worthy to be kept. And, this is how you keep her.

Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

In '94, I started writing a novel about an enormous terrorist act that destroyed the United States. The novel takes place twenty years after this destruction, with all the stuff that we're dealing with now - a dirty war, the disappeared, the concept of terrorism. Anyway, 9/11 happened some years into the process, and I was like, OK, I don't have a novel.

I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'

The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.

Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.

Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.

You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.

Mine (story) ain't the scariest, the clearest, the most painful, or the most beautiful. It just happens to be the one that's got it's fingers around my throat.

The people I know who would support [Donald] Trump are keeping their mouths shut.

That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.

...one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.

There's a long-term tradition of white supremacy in this country. [Donald] Trump isn't something entirely new. But then there is the crisis for white supremacy in this country now where you have people of color standing up for themselves in ways that they've never stood up for themselves or at least standing up for themselves in a generational, novel way.

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.

but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.

I find reading to be a delight, a source of comfort, a way to explore.

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