Junot Diaz Quotes

There are a lot of people who give you the message that maybe you are not good enough, and the best thing you can do for yourself is to block out all of that noise.

I am a firm believer that the only person who can make you feel inferior is yourself.

I do feel that I myself wouldn't have had, in my life looking back, the courage to go out and say, 'I'm a good actress.' So I think I'm one of those people that needed to be seen by someone else to see myself.

Comparison is a brutal assault upon one's self. Once you compare yourself to someone else, what you're really saying is that what you're made of isn't good enough.

I've learned from personal experience that insecurity and doubting yourself can really hurt you.

It is easier to overcome people's judgments than to overcome our own self-judgment.

The idea that you're hard to love is ludicrous.

No one goes unscathed, we all go through things. We just can't let people's nasty words become our beliefs about ourselves, you know?

However you arrive at the ability to ignore self-doubt - if you can acquire it or possess it or find it or discover it - move beyond self-doubt.

The sensation of never feeling good enough or pretty enough will always be there. It's a constant dialogue, and you just learn to be more powerful than that other voice. When you hear it come up, you shut it down.

A man is always better than he thinks.

I was never a pretty girl, so I wasn't the one to get the boy. I used to cast myself as a good sport. Sometimes I wonder if I do that too much with roles I play, because if I'm absolutely truthful, I quite like being the best friend, or the supporting role, and actually I ought to gear-change and make myself the leading role.

I've struggled for confidence and had great doubts about myself. But, personally, I'm not riddled with guilt.

I think everybody, especially every woman that you speak to, has gone through periods of their life where they feel uncertain or insecure. But I've been fortunate in my own life never to have gone through extended periods of crippling insecurity.

I'm still conscious of whether people really accept me, but that insecurity makes me stronger.

Self-esteem starts out as a personal blessing, but it becomes nothing less than an evolutionary force.

Grow up? Get herself straightened out? Her mind reeled from the verbal battering. No matter what she did, her father would tell her she was wrong. Worthless. Undeserving.

I've been in situations where I've said to young people: "You're so personable, you're so articulate, you're clearly so bright, you're so good-looking - feel better about yourself!" But if at the core if you don't, all those words mean nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I am so secure in who I am. I really am! And I'm not conceited. I just think, 'Wow, okay, that's the life you want to live.' It wasn't about who he chose. I mean, I had moments, 'Am I not sexy enough? Am I not pretty enough? Am I not smart enough?' But in so many of those questions, I immediately stopped and said, 'No, don't start doing that.' Because you can get stuck in that cycle and you can carry on to other things.

Self-rejection is the biggest sin that you can commit.

And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt.

She said that by introducing me to all these great things, Mary Elizabeth gained a “superior position” that she wouldn’t need if she was confident about herself. She also said that people who try to control situations all the time are afraid that if they don’t, nothing will work out the way they want.

I just never really gave myself any credit. And because of that, nobody else did either. You mirror what the world mirrors to you.

There was a time when I was way too reliant upon other people's opinions and perspective of me. And I guess over time came to see how unhealthy that was. I mean it's almost like a sign of mental illness to base your self-worth on the opinions of complete strangers.

I have a lot of confidence, but little Self-Esteem. This has given me a tremendous creative spark because it forced me to keep proving myself.