Junot diaz

My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power.

You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods.

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...

Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous.

When I became my masked identity I was this incredible little nerd, but in the real world I had to be this tough kid from the neighborhood.

I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.

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...

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...

I wrote my first sucio story, as I call them, in 1997. This was always my 'cheater's book,' my book about sucios desgraciados. My plan was to write a book about how people deal with love and loss.

I'm sure I'm one of those undiagnosed people with social anxiety.