Junot Diaz Quotes

I come from a huge family and out of all 34 of my immediate family members, my heavier influences were women. Between my grandmothers, aunts, older female cousins, and of course my mother, I was pretty much predominantly raised by women, as they make up most of my family anyway.

I have a lot of very, very powerful women in my life. My mother being the first.

I didn't have a mother; I had a mama. I measure other women by the stature of my mama.

I've got three sisters, five aunties, and my mom. It must have had an influence on me growing up.

I'm used to having strong women around me. My mother was. My wife is. I like their strong mentality.

I grew up in a family with two very strong women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life. I've spent a life loving women, and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to.

I've been blessed to have an amazing mom and two amazing sisters - so they set a very high standard.

I grew up with three sisters, so I got used to being around them and all of their worries about fashion and what they are wearing.

My mother was gentle and warm. She was the sort of person you could really open up to. I was the eldest and her only boy, so I guess I was treated differently. She did bring me up as a Catholic, and at one time I was an altar boy, but I lost my faith, as did my father, when my mother died at 45.

I grew up in a family with two very strong women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life.

I was raised primarily by women. I had a mother who almost killed herself to survive, I had a sister who was eight years older who was like a second mother, and my mother had two sisters. In the environment I grew up in, I heard a lot of female perspectives.

Families are endlessly fascinating. We all have one, and they have a great impact on who we are and what we do - Freudian as that is.

I have three sisters and I've always wanted a brother, so I was really interested in that notion.

I do like strong women in my movies. I have five sisters, so I've just grown up with that model.

I grew up in a house full of women. I have two older sisters and my mum who is a very strong woman.

I grew up with my two sisters and my mom, so it's my lot in life to be surrounded by women.

I had grown up in a world dominated by women - I had aunts and sisters and great-aunts - and I just felt like I lived in a completely female world.

I was really lucky to have been raised in this really powerful matriarchy where my dad was around, but I was with my mom and my grandma most of the time. They were heavy influences on me. My mother has a career in technology; my grandma sold real estate.

If you have no brothers and sisters it defines you for life; even when you're thirty you refer to yourself as an only child.

I've got two older sisters, which I think was the best thing, but also the worst thing. They dressed me up like a girl, but at the same time I think they taught me a lot of what they experienced and what they lived through, and passed that on to me as a young man and influenced how I approached not only women, but people. I got very lucky with the family I was born into. From my older sisters to my mother and father, they're just good, kind-hearted people.

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.

I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.

I grew up with two sisters, no brothers. There was Ronny who produced "Happy Days" for me and my sister Penny who acts, directs - she does everything. So they were very strong women in my life.

I respond to powerful women. I'm not intimidated by that, I like that, it's not something I shy away from, so I don't want women who are looking for me to take care of them. To me, that's a turn-off. I respond to strong, powerful, independent women.

Sisters, while they are growing up, tend to be very rivalrous and as young mothers they are given to continual rivalrous comparisons of their several children. But once the children grow older, sisters draw closer together and often, in old age, they become each other's chosen and most happy companions. In addition to their shared memories of childhood and of their relationship to each other's children, they share memories of the same home, the same homemaking style, and the same small prejudices about housekeeping that carry the echoes of their mother's voice.