398 Quotes by Junot Díaz

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.

I was in fact pretty much – by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV – encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men.

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

I’ve been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That’s what I do: I teach them writing.

Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones.

As for my slowness as a writer – that’s been a struggle, no question. We live in a culture that values and rewards machine-speed productivity. Even the arts are expected to conform to the Taylor model of productivity.

Spin is ‘something is beautiful because we say it’s beautiful.’

Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That’s the nature of genre.

Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain’t no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.