Top 180 Junot Díaz Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.”

— Junot Díaz

152. “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 Díaz

153. “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 Díaz

154. “In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace – and because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”

— Junot Díaz

155. “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 Díaz

156. “Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we’re always lacking something.”

— Junot Díaz

157. “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 Díaz

158. “Honestly, connecting once at the deepest level with someone, you know, once you’ve done that, even if your life goes to hell, man, it was really worth living.”

— Junot Díaz

159. “As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality.”

— Junot Díaz

160. “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 Díaz

161. “Literature is less involved in giving you answers and more dedicated to giving you insight.”

— Junot Díaz

162. “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 Díaz

163. “I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.”

— Junot Díaz

164. “Katrina was one of those things that rips the clothes off of the guy who keeps saying he’s a saint, and underneath you see that he’s a monster.”

— Junot Díaz

165. “It took me sixteen years to write.”

— Junot Díaz

166. “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 Díaz

167. “Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertibe knowledge that she will never forgive you.”

— Junot Díaz

168. “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 Díaz

169. “Character is the plot in many ways.”

— Junot Díaz

170. “There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.”

— Junot Díaz

171. “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 Díaz

172. “To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs.”

— Junot Díaz

173. “A person doesn’t mourn forever.”

— Junot Díaz

174. “I guess I’m just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments.”

— Junot Díaz

175. “In the end, all worlds, whether they’re set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don’t got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don’t get it twisted: you still got to do some work.”

— Junot Díaz

176. “I have three storage units, and that’s no lie. Three storage units. All books.”

— Junot Díaz

177. “Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship – it’s all one person speaking.”

— Junot Díaz

178. “As for my slowness as a writer – that’s been a struggle, no question. We live in a culture that values and rewards machine-speed productivity. Even the arts are expected to conform to the Taylor model of productivity.”

— Junot Díaz

179. “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 Díaz

180. “In fact, looking at the darkest sides of the United States has only made me appreciate the things that we do right, the things that we do beautifully. We are, for all of our mistakes and all of our crimes, a remarkable place.”

— Junot Díaz