A biography for Junot Diazhasn’t been written yet.
“I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.”
“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.”
“I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.”
“Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.”
“Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.”
“Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in.”
“Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.”
“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.”
“I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.”
“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.”
“Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous.”
“I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.”
“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.”
“I mean, the nation in which we live - and the world in which we live - is so extraordinarily more like a future than the futures that we're being sold on the screen and on television.”
“You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods.”
“I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.”
“My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.”
“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.”
“In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work.”
“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.”