Top 180 Junot Díaz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The only way out is in.”

— Junot Díaz

2. “The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.”

— Junot Díaz

3. “The half-life of love is forever.”

— Junot Díaz

4. “But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”

— Junot Díaz

5. “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 Díaz

6. “We all have a blind spot and it’s shaped exactly like us.”

— Junot Díaz

7. “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves.”

— Junot Díaz

8. “Colleagues are a wonderful thing – but mentors, that’s where the real work gets done.”

— Junot Díaz

9. “In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”

— Junot Díaz

10. “She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you’ll know loss the rest of your life.”

— Junot Díaz

11. “If you didn’t grow up like I did then you don’t know, and if you don’t know it’s probably better you don’t judge.”

— Junot Díaz

Featured in: Judging Quotes, Quotes About Growing Up

12. “And that’s when I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.”

— Junot Díaz

13. “I’m an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.”

— Junot Díaz

14. “It’s never the changes we want that change everything.”

— Junot Díaz

15. “I’m like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.”

— Junot Díaz

16. “Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That’s just the truth of it.”

— Junot Díaz

17. “Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.”

— Junot Díaz

18. “I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.”

— Junot Díaz

19. “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 Díaz

20. “My African roots made me what I am today. They’re the reason I exist at all.”

— Junot Díaz

21. “Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.”

— Junot Díaz

22. “Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own.”

— Junot Díaz

23. “She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.”

— Junot Díaz

24. “You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.”

— Junot Díaz

Featured in: Breakup Quotes

25. “Stereotypes, they’re sensual, cultural weapons. That’s the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing.”

— Junot Díaz

26. “I guess it’s true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.”

— Junot Díaz

27. “For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.”

— Junot Díaz

28. “I think men spend so much time passing for being men.”

— Junot Díaz

29. “Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.”

— Junot Díaz

30. “Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain’t no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.”

— Junot Díaz

31. “That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.”

— Junot Díaz

32. “She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.”

— Junot Díaz

33. “A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli’s first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve.”

— Junot Díaz

34. “Know that in this world there’s somebody who will always love you.”

— Junot Díaz

35. “You can’t regret the life you didn’t lead.”

— Junot Díaz

36. “This is what I know: people’s hopes go on forever.”

— Junot Díaz

37. “It’s just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it’s over, it’s over. You never get over it.”

— Junot Díaz

38. “God bless perseverance. Because it’s not easy.”

— Junot Díaz

39. “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 Díaz

40. “People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.”

— Junot Díaz

Featured in: Strong Quotes

41. “The greatest myth of all is what America is. I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration.”

— Junot Díaz

42. “If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other’s oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble.”

— Junot Díaz

43. “The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should’ve arrested him for it.”

— Junot Díaz

44. “It’s exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.”

— Junot Díaz

45. “You’re Dominican only if you do this, this, and that. And if you do this and that, you’ll be accepted to a certain degree and if you don’t, people will scorn you for it.”

— Junot Díaz

46. “I never hear white writers get asked, ‘Do you worry about how you represent white people?’”

— Junot Díaz

47. “Of course we all know that’s not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.”

— Junot Díaz

48. “I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity. It’s like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves.”

— Junot Díaz

49. “Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world – that’s pretty marvelous.”

— Junot Díaz

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

— Junot Díaz