Junot Diaz Quotes

Location is a very important aspect to songwriting.

To me, the contemporary novel suffers from a lack of sense of place - or spirit of place, if you will. It's not important to most writers, I must assume, or they try to research a given background on sabbatical. Not for me. I write about places I've lived long before I ever set pen to paper.

I've never set a book in Europe. I've lived in Europe three times, but somehow or other it wasn't the experience that engaged me in that way.

If you're sitting in a place like Martha's Vineyard, I don't think you're going to write a song about a ski resort.

I think you can tell any human story in a particular place.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

Africa's not a color - it's a place.

I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

If you ask me, the place that a story happens is as equal character. It's almost like an ecological viewpoint: These people are living in this piece of land, and in this piece of land in this time this is possible. For me, I almost think location first. It's time first - what year is it - then where are we, and then who is in it.

I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.

My father came here from Mexico.

I've written songs everywhere, and I think the place does matter.

I can't write anything if I don't know where it's set, where the events are happening - even if the details of setting are minimal.

My songs don't deal with locations that specifically, even if there are very specific references to them in there; they're sort of just where stories happen, not the stories themselves.

Something that has been every important to me in all my projects has been location, the place where they are installed.

Genius is not only a what or a who, it is a where. It is grounded in a place every single time.

For whatever you're doing, for your creative juices, your geography's got a hell of a lot to do with it. You really have to be in a good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your way from there.

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?

Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

Time is always a component of place; you can't really talk about where without talking about when.

My identity and my background still remain with me when I go to a foreign country. I have kept my nationality.

I was born in Egypt, and my family moved to London when I was seven. I grew up mostly in Clapham, where I also went to school after a brief stint in Whitechapel.

I don't think I could set a book in a place without knowing it really well.