In Forever The half-life of love is forever. – Junot Diaz The Cheater’s Guide to Love. Short story from collection, This is How You Lose Her.
I was in fact pretty much – by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV – encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men. – 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
New Jersey is to New York what Santo Domingo is to the United States. I always felt that those two landscapes, not only just the landscapes themselves but their relationships to what we would call ‘a center’ or ‘the center of the universe,’ has in some ways defined my artistic and critical vision. – Junot Diaz
Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world – that’s pretty marvelous. – Junot Diaz
I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn’t have a safe category. – Junot Diaz
I can’t imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn’t pass through a time of geekiness. – 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
I’m one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I’ve been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola. – Junot Diaz
My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power. – Junot Diaz
Books don’t live and die by awards. You don’t listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards. – Junot Diaz
When I got heartbroken at 20, it just felt like someone had spiraled a football right into my skull. At 40, it feels like someone had driven a 757 right through me. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field. – Junot Diaz
I know for a fact that – it’s just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel. – Junot Diaz
The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles – for you to get on parity with what women’s representations of men are. – Junot Diaz
My thing is, I’m just way too harsh. It’s an enormous impediment, and that’s just the truth of it. It doesn’t make me any better, make me any worse, it certainly isn’t more valorous. I have a character defect, man. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end – whether we’ve had direct experience or not – there’s part of you that knows there’s absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it. – Junot Diaz
I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they’re threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit. – Junot Diaz
I mean, the nation in which we live – and the world in which we live – is so extraordinarily more like a future than the futures that we’re being sold on the screen and on television. – Junot Diaz
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. – Junot Diaz
Like most lit nerds, I’m a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it – some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what’s the use of putting them down on paper. – 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 franchise. – Junot Diaz