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

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.

Junot Diaz

I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.

Junot Diaz

I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.

Junot Diaz

I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.

Junot Diaz

I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.

Junot Diaz

I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.

Junot Diaz

I find infidelity interesting because it's so revelatory about people. It's this really silent thing. Everyone acknowledges it as a general practice, but nobody likes to go beyond that, to get down to the nitty-gritty.

Junot Diaz

I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.

Junot Diaz

I mean, look, we're living in a country where you can't have a non-denominational response. If you're slightly critical of either party, all of the partisans jump on you like you're a lunatic.

Junot Diaz

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.

Junot Diaz

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.

Junot Diaz

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.

Junot Diaz

My father was a trigamist; he supported three families. We were never not poor.

Junot Diaz

Long before the idea of multiculturalism, in public people could say almost anything to you and get away with it.

Junot Diaz

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...

Junot Diaz

For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.

Junot Diaz

We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way.

Junot Diaz

It took me sixteen years to write.

Junot Diaz

I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we woul...

Junot Diaz

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

Junot Diaz

In minority communities there's a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There's a misunderstanding of what an artist does.

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