Junot Diaz Quotes

You write alone, but you write hoping that there will be readers who will connect with what you write, and it's so wonderful and amazing - I can't even tell you - when that actually happens.

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.

I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.

I'm just trying to write things that resonate with people. And when we're all going through something together, I think you smile after that - I hope that people leave inspired after one of my shows.

Dance should touch people.

What do artists do? Artists give people something they didn't know they were missing: a dance, a piece of music, a painting, a piece of sculpture. Catering to that need is the best business strategy.

It's not something you can find. There's a moment you arrive at --- there's no words for it. A bunch of people come together at this place where a note hits your heart and your brain tells your finger where to go. It's an otherworldly thing, like when a painter gets the right combination of colors together.

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.

I thought, "If I can make you feel what it's like for that first super-passionate love, other people might like that too," and, of course, they did.

Everything was a song. Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love... if you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.

People will come up to me at shows and tell me that a song touched them in a completely different way than I wrote it. That's fun. Fans translating it in their own way.

The arts are weapons of understanding and weapons of happiness.

Music inspires me.

I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work, and it creates this strange connection.

Writing with you is the only thing that keeps me alive.

I love the art form of songwriting. I get to carry a lot of vibes to a lot of people. My songs are all about the human condition, and people will be able to find themselves in my songs.

I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.

All art to me is an empathetic act. Whoever's telling a story is trying to transfer emotion into someone else.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

The greatest music is made for love, not for money.

Music was a large part of my life. and it is a bit cliche, but it's a way people come together.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

I love meeting people who've read my books. The prime reason to be on the planet is to make things I can show to other people: paintings, books, movies.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.