Junot Diaz Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.”

“I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood.”

“I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet.”

“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 was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.”

“I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.”

“Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'”

“We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves.”

“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.”

“Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in.”