Junot Diaz Quotes

Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

It is only through books that we partake of the great harvest that is human civilization across the ages.

A nation’s literature is the expression of a nation's mind in writing and the concentration of intellect for the purpose of spreading itself abroad and multiplying its energy

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

Writers are stewards of the culture. Publishers, librarians, bookstore owners. We're all in this together. To write books that are gripping, important, that people want to have, is to keep publishing alive.

I want to contribute to the culture and keep great writers alive by telling the stories of their lives.

Your library teacher would say, "What happens to a generation that doesn't read the Classics?" Me, I'm not your library teacher. But I have some of the same questions and concerns, you know?

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

I owe so much to Shakespeare. Nothing is more humbling and more exhilarating than taking ahold of those sacred words and riding them like a wave.

Shakespeare belongs to the whole of mankind, not just one country.

Shakespeare and Co dedicates itself to a shared, heady and outdated ideal that is scarce in our protective and fearful age.

Literature is a house with many mansions.

I haven't studied history - I couldn't give a discourse in medieval literature - but I am a personal historian, and I do a lot to take in the histories of the people around me.

I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.

I think every writer wants future generations to read what he has written.