398 Quotes by Junot Díaz

Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.

My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

I love ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X.’ That was like the only black book we read in high school.

New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It’s old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.

I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

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

Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations – but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.

Of course we all know that’s not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.