Junot Diaz Quotes

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

Every kid has a story to tell!

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

I love theater. I love sitting in an audience and having the actors right there, playing out what it means to be a human being.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful.

When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

I'm constantly surprised by human nature and humanity. And I think that's why I love what I do: because I love to story-tell and bring new characters to life.

If you are not breaking rules and you are not taking risks, you are not going to end up with movies where there is discovery... and, to me, that is the magic of going into the cinema.

If you know everything, it keeps you from writing. You don't want a story to burn you out instead of surprising you.

We like epic stories, we like adventure, we like epic fights, so if you can mix a great story that can also really teach someone about a different experience, you have the potential to really help people.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

Storytellers broaden our minds: engage, provoke, inspire, and ultimately, connect us.

Our fundamental task as human beings is to seek out connections-to exercise our imaginations.

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

They say to just write about what's happening in your backyard because that's where you find the most creativity. It's in the DNA of the show. There's no question.

Genius points the way, talent takes it.

Creativity is a renewable resource.

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

I'm inspired by everything, really. I'm inspired by locations and travel, I'm inspired by art and music, I'm inspired by people. When my curiosity peaks and I want to know everything about the subject, I want to know how I can get more deeply involved.

Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world. Some people never have them at all... I get them two or three times a week.