Junot Diaz Quotes - Page 8

I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.

So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.

I'm really into the rights of immigrants, the rights of the working poor. I'm one of those little activist types. I probably would have just gone to law school. And the scary part is that I was one of those kids who always tested really well. You put a test in front of me, and I would have been like do-do-do-do-do. I probably would have been some community lawyer somewhere - if anything, that's probably what I would have been doing.

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.

Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.

Literature is less involved in giving you answers and more dedicated to giving you insight.

For me I was always a smart nerdy kid. I wasn't the smartest and I wasn't the nerdiest, but I was a smart nerdy kid my whole childhood, and I definitely wanted to be somehow involved with reading the rest of my life, and I came from a community, I lived in a community, I was part of a community where reading was considered completely alien.

We have a whole bunch of young people and a whole bunch of families. Are we going to disrupt these families and tear them apart? Or are we going think, like, listen - these people are here. We’ve got to deal with this reality. We’ve got to extend the franchise.

The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are.

A young person, or someone who's writing in a different way - in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it's good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.

When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.

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.

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

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.

Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.

I feel most like myself... after I run - I go out for five miles every morning.

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

Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it.

Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.

I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments.

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 wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.

To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.

One of the many characteristics of the new is that, at first, it's very hard to recognize it for what it is. We're lucky if we recognize something as being new when it first appears. Usually I think we don't have that privilege. It's usually after the fact that we suddenly turn around and say, 'Wow, this thing is amazing.'

Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something.