Literary Birthday - 31 December

Happy Birthday, Junot Díaz, born 31 December 1968

Junot Díaz Quotes

1. 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.
2. That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep it away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.
3. You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. 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.
4. You can’t regret the life you didn’t lead.
5. What we 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.
6. Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.
7. I guess I don’t know what my genres are because I keep discovering new kinds of books to enjoy.
8. This is what I know: people’s hopes go on forever.
9. And that’s when I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.
10. The half-life of love is forever.

Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at MIT, and fiction editor at Boston Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This is How You Lose Her was on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2012 list. 

by Amanda Patterson From Writers Write