Junot Diaz Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Junot Diaz:

Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.

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

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

Junot Diaz

I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.

Junot Diaz

Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.

Junot Diaz

I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.

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 any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

Junot Diaz

Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous.

Junot Diaz

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

Junot Diaz

You know, I was a kid who had difficulty speaking English when I first immigrated. But in my head, when I read a book, I spoke English perfectly. No one could correct my Spanish. And I think that I retreated to books as a way, you know, to be, like, masterful in a language that was really difficult for me for many years.

Junot Diaz

So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.

Junot Diaz

Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.

Junot Diaz

The thing is, you try your best, and what else you got? You try your best, really, that's all you can do. And for me, my best happens really so rarely.

Junot Diaz

When I enter that higher-order space that's required to write, I'm a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it's ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful.

Junot Diaz

Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it.

Junot Diaz

I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.

Junot Diaz

I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.

Junot Diaz

Let me tell you, if I could write one-tenth as fast as some of my friends, I'd be made. I'd be it. But instead I happen to be, in the tree of life of writers, down at the bottom, with the hematodes.

Junot Diaz

I wrote my first sucio story, as I call them, in 1997. This was always my 'cheater's book,' my book about sucios desgraciados. My plan was to write a book about how people deal with love and loss.

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 don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it.

Junot Diaz

Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.

Junot Diaz

I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it.

Junot Diaz

Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don't feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family.

Junot Diaz

Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.

Junot Diaz

We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell; but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.

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

I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.

Junot Diaz

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

Junot Diaz

I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.

Junot Diaz

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.

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

When I think about my own relationships to the women that I really loved, it feels like that love, even after we've broken up and we're no longer speaking, that love never goes away. No one told me that.

Junot Diaz

Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.

Junot Diaz

I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.

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

There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.

Junot Diaz