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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 Diaz

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We're On Speaking Terms

Junot Diaz

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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?

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We Hide So Well. This Is The Bottom Line: How Hidden Is Male Subjectivity? Name Five Books Where Male Subjectivity Is Produced In An Honest Way.

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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 Toilet, On The No. 6 Train, At Shea Stadium. I Did Everything I Could. But None Of It Worked.

My Father Was A Little League Dictator. That Really Affected Me, His Control-freakery, His Impunity, His Arbitrary Unreasonable Power.

I Was Surrounded By A Lot Of Male Writers Of Color Who Have This Incredibly Bizarre Relationship To Masculinity. It's Like We Were All Mega-nerds But You Would Never Know That If You Listened To The Way They Talk About Themselves.

I Think What Happened To Me Was That I Was Always Being Taught To Look, But One Day I Started To See. And It Was Because A Lot Of Women In My Life Were Refusing Just To Be Looked At, To Be This Passive Figure.

I Grew Up In The Shadow Of The Trujillato, Saw How The Regime Had Ravaged So Many Families.

I'm An Immigrant And I Will Stay An Immigrant Forever.

I Didn't Start Writing Until Late High School And Then I Was Just Diddling. Mainly I Loved To Read And My Writing Was An Outgrowth Of That.

Any Art Worth Its Name Requires You To Be Fundamentally Lost For A Very Long Time.

We All Dream Dreams Of Unity, Of Purity; We All Dream That There's An Authoritative Voice Out There That Will Explain Things, Including Ourselves. If It Wasn't For Our Longing For These Things, I Doubt The Novel Or The Short Story Would Exist In Its Current Form. I'm Not Going To Say Much More On The Topic. Just Remember: In Dictatorships, Only One Person Is Really Allowed To Speak. And When I Write A Book Or A Story, I Too Am The Only One Speaking, No Matter How I Hide Behind My Characters.

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 Normal, They Forgot Even That There Was A World Above.

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You Never Forget The Discovery Years. First Kisses. The First Time You Try Certain Foods.

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A Person Doesn't Mourn Forever.

I Am A Chatty Person, But Colossally Discreet.

I Think That Most Of My Writer Friends Are Really Compulsive. I Think That's Great. It's Wonderful For Them. It's Just Not My Bag. It's Not The Way I Work. But Again, It's Probably Why My Friend Has Ten Books Out And I Have Two.

I Was Neither Black Enough For The Black Kids Or Dominican Enough For The Dominican Kids. I Didn't Have A Safe Category.

The People I Know Who Would Support [donald] Trump Are Keeping Their Mouths Shut.

The U.s. That I Had Imagined Was Nowhere Near As Crazy And As Incredibly Damaging And Brutal And Indifferent As The U.s. That We're Currently Living In. I Thought I Was Being Transgressive, Apocalyptic, An Out-there Person. And Then Reality Lapped Me, It Just Lapped Me.

The Idea That America Has Cornered The Market On Anti-immigration Is Ridiculous. It's A Global Phenomenon.

'oscar Wao' For Example Cohered In A Period Of Terrible Distress. All The Novels That I Wanted To Write Were Not Happening.

The Thing Is - Do We Really Need Another Writer Who Writes A Book Every Eighteen Months, Whether The Quality Is Wonderful Or Not? I Mean, Maybe. But I Can Name Twenty Off The Top Of My Head Who Do It. Maybe What We Need Is A Writer Like Me Who Goes Very Slow, As Well.

Character Is The Plot In Many Ways

Even If You Didn't Come From Another Country, The Idea Of How Do You Make A Home Somewhere New Is Common To Anyone Who's Either Going To College, Shifting Towns.

When I Got Heartbroken At 20, It Just Felt Like Someone Had Spiraled A Football Right Into My Skull. At 40, It Feels Like Someone Had Driven A 757 Right Through Me.

For Kind Of Sophisticated Art I'm Interested In, The Larger Structural Rebuke Has To Be So Subtle That It Has To Be Distributed At An Almost Sub-atomic Level. Otherwise, You Fall Into The Kind Of Preachy, Moralistic Fable That I Don't Think Makes For Good Literature.

Cities Produce Love And Yet Feel None. A Strange Thing When You Think About It, But Perhaps Fitting. Cities Need That Love More Than Most Of Us Care To Imagine. Cities, After All, For All Their Massiveness, All Their There-ness, Are Acutely Vulnerable.

Nobody Likes Children, Your Mother Assured You. That Doesn't Mean You Don't Have Them.

I Seem To Enjoy Telling Stories With A Central Absence, With A Lacuna Tunnelled Into Them.

The Only Difference Between A Published And Unpublished Writer Is A Tolerance For Imperfection.

My Mother Took Care Of Us Until My Father Scrammed, And Then She Ended Up Working In The Small-factory Sector Of New Jersey With A Lot Of Other Immigrants.

Every Time You Hear Anyone Talk About The Caribbean, Whether It's Caribbeans Themselves Or People Outside, There's Always Talk About Women's Bodies. Talk About This Voluptuousness, This Kind Of Stereotype Of What A Caribbean Person Is. And I Think These Are Stereotypes That Even People Inside The Culture, We Actually Sometimes Claim Them And We're Very Proud.

There Is A Lot Of Scepticism Today As To Whether Memoir Is Real. But When Fiction Is Done At A Certain Level There Is Scepticism As To Whether It Is Really Fiction.

I Write Very, Very Slowly, And For Me, I Have To Summon All Sorts Of Resources To Make One Of These Pieces Work.

I Have Three Storage Units, And That's No Lie. Three Storage Units. All Books.

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.

You Really Want To Know What Being An X-man Feels Like? Just Be A Smart Bookish Boy Of Color In A Contemporary U.s. Ghetto. Mamma Mia! Like Having Bat Wings Or A Pair Of Tentacles Growing Out Of Your Chest.

I Mean, I’m An Artist By Nature, No One Considers What I Do And No One Knows Who The Heck I Am, But That Anybody Does - It Is Astonishing.

My Thing Is Every Generation Of Americans Has To Answer What We Call The 'superman Question.' Superman Comes, Lands In America. He's Illegal. He's One Of These Kids. He's Wrapped Up In A Red Bullfighter's Cape. And You've Got To Decide What We're Gonna Do With Superman.

I Was Really Drawn To Thinking About The Women In My Life. Thinking About My Mother, Who's A Very Powerful Force On Me. And I Have These Two Very Strong Sisters Who Took Up A Lot Of Imaginary Space In My Life.

But It's Clear To Me That Us Slow-poke Writers Are A Dying Breed. It's Amazing How Thoroughly My Young Writing Students Have Internalized The New Machine Rhythm, The Rush Many Of My Young Writers Are In To Publish. The Majority Don't Want To Sit On A Book For Four, Five Years. The Majority Don't Want To Listen To The Silence Inside And Outside For Their Artistic Imprimatur. The Majority Want To Publish Fast, Publish Now.

Privilege Does Not Operate Without Silence.

We Get These Lives For Free. I Didn't Do Anything To Get This Life, And No Matter What The Hardships Are, It Is Free And, In A Way, It's An Extraordinary Bargain.

In Minority Communities There's A Sensitivity, Often A Knee-jerk Reaction, To Critical Representations. There's A Misunderstanding Of What An Artist Does.

It's Never The Changes We Want That Change Everything.

When She Smiles Niggers Ask Her For Her Hand In Marriage; When I Smile Folks Check Their Wallets.

Just The Fact That You Get To Live And Breathe And Interact With The World - That's Pretty Marvelous.

If You Want To Make A Human Being Into A Monster, Deny Them, At The Cultural Level Any Reflection Of Themselves

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