110+ Junot Diaz Quotes On Education, Book And Writing

Junot Diaz is a Dominican-American writer who has written several books and short stories, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He is a professor of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the board of advisors of Freedom University, an organization that provides educational opportunities for undocumented immigrants. He is also the founder of the nonprofit organization, Voice of Witness, which uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Junot Diaz on education, life, book.

Top 10 Junot Diaz Quotes

1. But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
2. The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.
3. Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.
4. She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.
5. [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.
6. The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
7. As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.
8. I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet.
9. She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.
10. And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.

Junot Diaz Short Quotes

• I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
• Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertibe knowledge that she will never forgive you.
• I find reading to be a delight, a source of comfort, a way to explore.
• The people I know who would support [Donald] Trump are keeping their mouths shut.
• Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.
• To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs.
• Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
• We all have a blind spot and it's shaped exactly like us.
• I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
• [The biggest disappointment is] that he [Barack Obama] deported everybody and their grandmother.

Junot Diaz Quotes About Life

The half-life of love is forever. — Junot Diaz

I think what happened to me was that I was always being taught to look, but one day I started to see. And it was because a lot of women in my life were refusing just to be looked at, to be this passive figure. — Junot Diaz

When you're the ones in the life raft and you have four or five women in the life raft who put it together, by the end of it your nerves are blown. The people you're going to attack are the people who are helping you, who you are holding it together with. — Junot Diaz

I was really drawn to thinking about the women in my life. Thinking about my mother, who's a very powerful force on me. And I have these two very strong sisters who took up a lot of imaginary space in my life. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

The only way out is in. — Junot Diaz

That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough. — Junot Diaz

In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead. — Junot Diaz

Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life. — Junot Diaz

Honestly, connecting once at the deepest level with someone, you know, once you've done that, even if your life goes to hell, man, it was really worth living. — Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz Quotes About Book

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get. — Junot Diaz

Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over. — Junot Diaz

I think that most of my writer friends are really compulsive. I think that's great. It's wonderful for them. It's just not my bag. It's not the way I work. But again, it's probably why my friend has ten books out and I have two. — Junot Diaz

If you really want a prize, or if you really want applause, you should try to write as many books as humanly possible. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful. — Junot Diaz

The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book. — Junot Diaz

This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is. — Junot Diaz

The thing is - do we really need another writer who writes a book every eighteen months, whether the quality is wonderful or not? I mean, maybe. But I can name twenty off the top of my head who do it. Maybe what we need is a writer like me who goes very slow, as well. — Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz Quotes About Love

I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy. — Junot Diaz

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That's what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma- she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you. — Junot Diaz

Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God. — Junot Diaz

What else she doesn't know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again. — Junot Diaz

Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you. — Junot Diaz

Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own. — Junot Diaz

You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it? There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It's just a matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it. — Junot Diaz

Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth. — Junot Diaz

Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel. — Junot Diaz

Love is the only thing - I don't want to say that "makes it bearable" - but I feel like without the possibility of love, this place would just devour us. — Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz Quotes About Writing

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. — Junot Diaz

I think that if you're writing about the human condition, my God, you've got to start at base: point zero, point one, is the body. — Junot Diaz

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

I'm having so much trouble with writing. Maybe if I help other people, it'll be easier for me. — Junot Diaz

I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey. — Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

We know story collections end when they end, as well - the pages serving as a countdown - but nevertheless the standard story anthology hews closer to what makes being human so hard: it reminds you with each story how quickly everything we are, everything we call our lives can change, can be upended, can disappear. Never to return. — Junot Diaz

I think men spend so much time passing for being men. There's a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd. But it was the thing we weren't saying, that people were afraid to say, like, "Yo, what we do is nerdy by definition." — Junot Diaz

Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women. — Junot Diaz

As a Dominican man, you're socialized to be a playboy. You spend a lot of time being taught that women are important, but without the really positive framework of why. You figure out quickly it's because of culo (ass). But there is a sense that it's not that simple. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent. — Junot Diaz

As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality. — Junot Diaz

She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree. — Junot Diaz

Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number. — Junot Diaz

I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity. It's like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves. — Junot Diaz

We can speculate. Last time I checked, the future doesn't take my advice. — Junot Diaz

Mexico City is the center of art and culture and politics and has been and continues to be for Latin America in a way that I think really called to me as an artistic person, as someone that was interested in the politics of Latin America, you know. God, every single famous person in Latin American history and art and politics seems to have found their way to Mexico City. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

Now people like Susan Sarandon are noticing that people of color live this way?! This is the way I've always lived! What's happened is that it has now reached a level of national discourse where it's on the table. But they've never minded that we were treated like this off-stage. — Junot Diaz

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

Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her. — Junot Diaz

- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. - But your yourself sucks! - It is, lamentably, all I have. — Junot Diaz

My art feels like it's real disobedient. I can fill notebooks with observations and maybe they find their way into the work unconsciously, which is great. I've never been able to directly plug, like to take a little snip that I've picked up on the street and transfer it into a story. I don't know what's wrong, but it never works that way. — Junot Diaz

You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there. — Junot Diaz

In my mind what novels do best is that they immerse us deeply into our character's world - they truly transport us deep into these spaces - but the same way you know a Hollywood movie won't end after thirty minutes, you carry in yourself the implicit contract that the novel won't throw you out of itself 'til the very end. That bulk of pages is a form of consolation, of security. — Junot Diaz

The U.S. that I had imagined was nowhere near as crazy and as incredibly damaging and brutal and indifferent as the U.S. that we're currently living in. I thought I was being transgressive, apocalyptic, an out-there person. And then reality lapped me, it just lapped me. — Junot Diaz

...one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away. — Junot Diaz

This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance. — Junot Diaz

Usually at the end of each story we're thrown clear out of the story's world and then we're given a new world to enter. What's unique about a linked collection is that it can deliver both sets of narrative pleasures - the novel's long immersion into character-world and the story anthology's energetic (and mortal) brevity - the linked collection is unique in its ability to be both abrupt and longitudinal simultaneously. — Junot Diaz

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

You said i could call you when i wanted but that you wouldn’t call me. you have to decide where and when, you said. if you leave it up to me i’ll want to see you every day. At least you were honest, which is more than i can say for me. — Junot Diaz

[Immigrating] didn't burn out my desire to travel, though that can happen. There's nothing like immigration to make you want to just stay put. But what I think of as home is this life between Santo Domingo and the parts of New Jersey and New York City that were my childhood, so in my mind it's like home is all those things combined. — Junot Diaz

You think people hate a fat person? Try a fat person who's trying to get thin. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

When people are always telling you that you have to have a lot of women, women are very important, there's a chance that you might actually begin to observe them on a more fundamental level. Then you get so much focus that one day you might actually see. Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them. — Junot Diaz

And because love, real love, is not so easily shed. — Junot Diaz

A form wherein we can enjoy simultaneously what is best in both the novel and the short story form. My plan was to create a book that affords readers some of the novel's long-form pleasures but that also contains the short story's ability to capture what is so difficult about being human - the brevity of our moments, their cruel irrevocability. — Junot Diaz

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture — Junot Diaz

You can't be a human without seeing. — Junot Diaz

The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should’ve arrested him for it. — Junot Diaz

I think that distance is good for some people for certain projects. I mean this is sort of a dynamic question. Some projects require more distance than others, some don't require it at all. Sometimes you need it and sometimes you don't. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you? — Junot Diaz

It's never the changes we want that change everything. — Junot Diaz

You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest. — Junot Diaz

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

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

[Donald] Trump is what happens in America every time it feels economically and politically threatened, and it encounters the limitations of its own white supremacists practices. — Junot Diaz

but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart. — Junot Diaz

You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those. — Junot Diaz

I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties. — Junot Diaz

Part of it is eight years of a black president, and white America still lost their [minds] about that. Part of it is a Republican politics of vicious, vicious partisan [stuff] that has completely poisoned what we would call the political rhetorical sphere. All of these things come together in a perfect storm. — Junot Diaz

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. — Junot Diaz

But it's clear to me that us slow-poke writers are a dying breed. It's amazing how thoroughly my young writing students have internalized the new machine rhythm, the rush many of my young writers are in to publish. The majority don't want to sit on a book for four, five years. The majority don't want to listen to the silence inside and outside for their artistic imprimatur. The majority want to publish fast, publish now. — Junot Diaz

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her. — Junot Diaz

If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other's oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble. — Junot Diaz

As an artist you're on a journey of discovery and sometimes that journey takes a long time, doesn't subscribe to [a] train schedule, to the punch-clock. And I need to read a lot to make my pages happen. — Junot Diaz

The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection. — Junot Diaz

A person doesn't mourn forever. — Junot Diaz

The body is what reminds us on a daily basis that we're human. The body defies us, it betrays us, we have to struggle with it, you know. And it reveals in curious and in abiding ways how we are not perfect. — Junot Diaz

Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain. — Junot Diaz

An ear will never do you wrong, but I know writers who... most of the language they use is just extracted language from other languages they've read. I am a big-time reader, but I mix and match. — Junot Diaz

For me, the battle isn't Hillary [Clinton] vs. [Bernie] Sanders. And I understand that for some people that's the battle. But for me, more than anything, it's stopping a Republican president. — Junot Diaz

The idea that America has cornered the market on anti-immigration is ridiculous. It's a global phenomenon. — Junot Diaz

It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above. — Junot Diaz

A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve. — Junot Diaz

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

Life Lessons by Junot Diaz

1. Junot Diaz emphasizes the importance of understanding and accepting one's cultural heritage, as well as the importance of empathy and kindness in relationships.
2. He also encourages readers to confront difficult topics and to strive for self-improvement and growth.
3. Through his work, Diaz encourages readers to be open-minded and to embrace their own unique identity and experiences.