Junot Diaz Quotes

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.

If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.

The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.

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.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

There's nothing more true in being a child of a diaspora, a child of immigrants. We're completely new to our parents. We're not something they can ever understand. And it's not as if we are ever going to be accepted. We're accepted as long as we conform to what we are expected to be, and I'm sure that's not any different for anyone else.

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.

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.

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

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.

I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.

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.

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.

In fact, looking at the darkest sides of the United States has only made me appreciate the things that we do right, the things that we do beautifully. We are, for all of our mistakes and all of our crimes, a remarkable place.

People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.

Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for.

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.

[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.

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

She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.

Do you remember? When the fights seemed to go on and on, and always ended with us in bed, tearing at each other like maybe that could change everything. In a couple of months you'd be seeing somebody else and I would too; she was no darker than you but she washed her panties in the shower and had hair like a sea of little punos and the first time you saw us, you turned around and boarded a bus I knew you didn't have to take. When my girl said, Who was that? I said, Just some girl.