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

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

— Junot Díaz

I mean, shit, what Latino family doesn't think it's cursed?

— Junot Díaz

In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a pass overrun by gangsters, puts, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a Cusco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.

— Junot Díaz

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

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

Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven—where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with—he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he'd jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge.

— Junot Díaz

It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

— Junot Díaz

It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it, they thought it's normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.

— Junot Díaz

I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.

— Junot Díaz