Top 180 Junot Díaz Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I was really drawn to thinking about the women in my life. Thinking about my mother, who’s a very powerful force on me. And I have these two very strong sisters who took up a lot of imaginary space in my life.”

— Junot Díaz

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

— Junot Díaz

103. “My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place.”

— Junot Díaz

104. “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 Díaz

105. “Spin is ‘something is beautiful because we say it’s beautiful.’”

— Junot Díaz

106. “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 Díaz

107. “Because I can’t seem to escape it. It’s a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.”

— Junot Díaz

108. “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 Díaz

109. “If you were a nerd computer geek in 1982, the amount of isolation you felt – at least what I experienced, or the kids I knew, the isolation they felt – was almost total. They were not part of society; no one thought they were cool.”

— Junot Díaz

110. “My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.”

— Junot Díaz

111. “I mean, I’m an artist by nature; no one considers what I do and no one knows who the heck I am, but that anybody does – it is astonishing.”

— Junot Díaz

112. “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 Díaz

113. “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 Díaz

114. “Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they’re asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power.”

— Junot Díaz

115. “We get these lives for free. I didn’t do anything to get this life, and no matter what the hardships are, it is free and, in a way, it’s an extraordinary bargain.”

— Junot Díaz

116. “You whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other’s arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise.”

— Junot Díaz

117. “That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.”

— Junot Díaz

118. “I’ve been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That’s what I do: I teach them writing.”

— Junot Díaz

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

— Junot Díaz

120. “I can’t imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn’t pass through a time of geekiness.”

— Junot Díaz

121. “I’m just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.”

— Junot Díaz

122. “I’m not writing fairy tales or object lessons.”

— Junot Díaz

123. “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 Díaz

124. “I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.”

— Junot Díaz

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

— Junot Díaz

126. “I love ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X.’ That was like the only black book we read in high school.”

— Junot Díaz

127. “The world should always be concerned whenever a vast human rights violation occurs anywhere on the planet.”

— Junot Díaz

128. “I can always tell if someone’s from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.”

— Junot Díaz

129. “I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn’t have a safe category.”

— Junot Díaz

130. “I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: ‘This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.’ I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.”

— Junot Díaz

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

— Junot Díaz

132. “I’m having so much trouble with writing. Maybe if I help other people, it’ll be easier for me.”

— Junot Díaz

133. “Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral: a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her, so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked.”

— Junot Díaz

134. “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 Díaz

135. “I really am a believer that 99.99% of all the stories we need, not only as artists but as human beings, not only as writers but as readers, haven’t been written yet. Certainly haven’t been published yet.”

— Junot Díaz

136. “Anger has a way of returning.”

— Junot Díaz

137. “I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.”

— Junot Díaz

138. “I think what happened to me was that I was always being taught to look, but one day I started to see. And it was because a lot of women in my life were refusing just to be looked at, to be this passive figure.”

— Junot Díaz

139. “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 Díaz

140. “She had reason to doubt him; he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.”

— Junot Díaz

141. “You know how it is when you get back with somebody you’ve loved. It felt better than it ever was, better than it ever could be again.”

— Junot Díaz

142. “The Prisoner’s Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat’s Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.”

— Junot Díaz

143. “Love is the only thing – I don’t want to say that “makes it bearable” – but I feel like without the possibility of love, this place would just devour us.”

— Junot Díaz

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

— Junot Díaz

145. “To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.”

— Junot Díaz

146. “I don’t think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.”

— Junot Díaz

147. “You can’t be a human without seeing.”

— Junot Díaz

148. “Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn’t mean you don’t have them.”

— Junot Díaz

149. “When I became my masked identity I was this incredible little nerd, but in the real world I had to be this tough kid from the neighborhood.”

— Junot Díaz

150. “Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.”

— Junot Díaz