We're on speaking terms today. I say, Maybe we should hang out with the boys, and you shake your head. I want to spend time with you, you say. If we're still good, next week, maybe. That's the most we can hope for. Nothing thrown, nothing said that we might remember for years. You watch me while you put a brush through your hair. Each strand that breaks is as long as my arm. You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be, but what can I tell you?

— Junot Díaz

...what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-...

— Junot Díaz

What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they've had beef. Like The Fantastic Four and Galactic, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Death stroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that's too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.

— Junot Díaz

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

— Junot Díaz

Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a.

— Junot Díaz

You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it? There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It's just a matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

— Junot Díaz

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

— Junot Díaz

You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams.

— Junot Díaz

You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams. When my first pen pal, Took, stopped writing me after three letters she was the one who laughed: You think someone's going to lose life writing to you? Of course, I cried; I was eight, and I had already planned that Took and her family would adopt me. My mother of course saw clean into the marrow of those dreams, and laughed. I wouldn't write to you either, she said. She was that kind of mother: who makes you doubt yourself, who would wipe you out if you let her. But I'm not going to pretend either. For a long time I let her say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.

— Junot Díaz

You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?" And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected and might not feel so monstrous for it.

— Junot Díaz