Junot Diaz Quotes

My wife Cecily Adams was dying of cancer, my daughter Madeline was struggling to overcome an autism diagnosis, and my father was dying, all at the same time. Writing the journal was a cathartic experience, and an extremely positive one.

To me, writing is remembering something funny that happened, or maybe something I said seven years ago.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

Cancer is a very sad thing, but you can always take something from every experience.

The conventional wisdom is - people say this all the time - you should only write something when you're far enough away from it that you can have a perspective. But that's not true. That's a story that you're telling. The truth of it is here, right now. It's the only truth that we ever know. And I'm interested in that truth and the confusion being part of the experience and sorting it your way through and figuring it out.

I write what feels real. I write things that are informed both by my own experience and by actual history.

You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.

Of course you bank on your experience, but as a sounding board. It isn't that you write down what happens to you every day. You wouldn't be a writer if you did that.

I don't talk about having cancer in my standup anymore. I don't have cancer. But if it comes up for me again, that I'm going through something, I'm going to talk about it. I'm going to do whatever feels right whenever it feels right.

When breast cancer took my mom, it met its biggest enemy.

I look around and pay attention to what around me is not being talked about, and then I talk about it with as much humour and honesty as I can. All my books have been that way.

I know that I have to give testimony about all the things I lived, but I need time.

I want people to talk about my comedy, about cancer, about body issues, about scars, because cancer, it's a big deal, but scars are not a big deal. My skin healed. Relax, you know? That's all it is.

'Creep,' unfortunately, was one of my true stories.

If someone has cancer, it's not just them who has cancer - it's everyone around them as well and it's tough.

You witness a lot as a journalist, and what you witness becomes a part of you.

I just know what I go through, and I know how to speak on it in an interesting way.

I never imagined while going through this horrifying illness that I would write a book or that it could ever be a movie.

I've been writing in some way, shape, or form for as long as I can remember.

For me, writing became a way of processing not just my own experiences, but the experiences of other people, and their pain.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

I have some great stories. But I am also very human, and I suffered an awful lot.

My dad was a great man, and I loved him, but he had some demons he fought. It was tough to see some of those things as a kid, but I believe God doesn't save you from things; he saves you through them.

You're as sick as your secrets, and my whole life was a secret, so it's just... it's been really healing, and I've found a lot of inner peace by just owning everything and moving forward from there.

I am beekeeper, but I am also a writer, and some years ago, I sat down at a typewriter to experiment with words, to try to tease out of the amorphous, chaotic and wordless part of myself the reason why I was staying on this hilltop in the Ozarks after my first husband, with whom I had started a beekeeping business, and I had divorced.