Junot Diaz Quotes & Sayings (Page 7)

“When I became my masked identity I was this incredible little nerd, but in the real world I had to be this tough kid from the neighborhood.”

“I read a book a week, man. And I don't have a great memory, but I have a good memory about what I read.”

“I'm a product of a fragmented world.”

“I'm of African descent and my sister looks completely black, but I didn't look black. I was the super-nerdy kid who was also willing to fight.”

“I'm sure I'm one of those undiagnosed people with social anxiety.”

“It's extraordinary how many people read a book that's new and weird and befriend it.”

“When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That's what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live.”

“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.”

“'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.”

“For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.”