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" 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
People
Nothing
Wrong
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" Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families. "
Junot Diaz
Love Is
Great
Love
" It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked. "
Junot Diaz
Work
Writing
Train
" For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature. "
Junot Diaz
Fall
You
Think
" I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time. "
Junot Diaz
Time
Powerful
Back
" The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones. "
Junot Diaz
People
Immigrant
Ending
" I do think that we all draw limits and I feel like part of the work of an artist is it shouldn't be fun. This shouldn't be comfortable. I'm not looking to make people feel unsafe, but I am looking to make people feel uncomfortable. "
Junot Diaz
Fun
I Am
Looking
" I'm sure I'm one of those undiagnosed people with social anxiety. "
Junot Diaz
Anxiety
People
Sure
" 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
Why
Work
Books
" 'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated. "
Junot Diaz
Mars
Princess
Influence
" New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino. "
Junot Diaz
Me
History
Latino
" My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool. "
Junot Diaz
Book
Past
Page
" 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
Language
Me
You
" I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished 'Drown' was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow. "
Junot Diaz
Busy
Job
Living
" Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre. "
Junot Diaz
Some
Your
Narrative
" 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
Reading
People
Writing
" 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
Lost
Character
Loss
" I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them. "
Junot Diaz
Telling
Enjoy
Seem
" When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling. "
Junot Diaz
Read
Wanted
Writing
" I love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school. "
Junot Diaz
Love
School
Black
" 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
Women
Broken
Love
" 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
You
Boy
Fear
" Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards. "
Junot Diaz
Live
Awards
Books
" I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard. "
Junot Diaz
Always
Someone
Die
" 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
Safe
Category
Enough
" 'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both. "
Junot Diaz
Book
Connected
Always
" To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail. "
Junot Diaz
Fail
Just
Outsider
" 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 Diaz
Power
Questions
Science
" Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.' "
Junot Diaz
Something
Because
Beautiful
" I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood. "
Junot Diaz
Dreams
Shadow
Time
" Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done. "
Junot Diaz
Work
Colleagues
Done