Junot Diaz

'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.

A young person, or someone who's writing in a different way - in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it's good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.

I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it.

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.

Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something.

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

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

It took me sixteen years to write.

I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.

I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.

I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.

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

Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.

To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.

People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.

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.

Character is the plot in many ways

Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.

Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.

Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.