Quotes by Junot Diaz

About Junot Diaz:

Junot Díaz is a Dominican American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in 2008. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

He's really jealous, Ybon said rather weakly. Just have him meet me, Oscar said. I make all boyfriends feel better about themselves.

Junot Diaz

...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.

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

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

Junot Diaz

Let’s just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.

Junot Diaz

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

Junot Diaz

The next day he woke up feeling like he'd been unshackled from his fat, like he'd been washed clean from his misery, and for a long time he couldn't remember why he felt this way, and then he said her name.

Junot Diaz

In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exha...

Junot Diaz

Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.

Junot Diaz

I seem to be allergic to diligence, and Lola said, Ha. What you're allergic to is trying.

Junot Diaz

You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams.

Junot Diaz

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person...

Junot Diaz

Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.

Junot Diaz

...what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-...

Junot Diaz

She was one of those golden mulatas that French-speaking Caribbeans call chabines, that my boys call chicas de oro; she had snarled, apocalyptic hair, copper eyes, and was one whiteskinned relative away from jaba.

Junot Diaz

I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: ‘A Stronger Loving World'. To the only panel he's circled. Oscar-who never defaced a book in his life-circled one panel three times in the same emphati...

Junot Diaz

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 th...

Junot Diaz

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows...

Junot Diaz

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

Junot Diaz

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...

Junot Diaz

Author Bio

  • NameJunot Diaz
  • DescriptionDominican-American writer
  • BornDecember 31, 1968
  • CountryUnited States Of America; Dominican Republic
  • ProfessionWriter; Faculty
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program; Rome Prize