“What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.”

—  Junot Díaz

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite…" by Junot Díaz?
Junot Díaz photo
Junot Díaz 75
Dominican-American writer 1968

Related quotes

Ward Cunningham photo

“The blogosphere is a community that might produce a work. Whereas a wiki is a work that might produce a community. It’s all just people communicating.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

Crucible of Creativity (2005)

Mo Yan photo
Jean-François Lyotard photo
Aldous Huxley photo

“Rational and kindly behavior tends to produce good results and these results remain good even when the behavior which produced them was itself produced by a pill.”

"Brave New World Revisited" (1956), in Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977), p. 99

Gore Vidal photo

“…American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes"
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

Thomas Mann photo

“Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Source: Death in Venice and Other Tales

Walt Whitman photo

“Do anything, but let it produce joy.”

Source: Leaves of Grass

Antonio Negri photo
Bertrand Russell photo

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)
Source: Unpopular Essays
Context: It is normal to hate what we fear, and it happens frequently, though not always, that we fear what we hate. I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. They have their own herd, originally a very small one. And within one herd, all are friends, unless there is some special ground of enmity. Other herds are potential or actual enemies; a single member of one of them who strays by accident will be killed. An alien herd as a whole will be avoided or fought according to circumstances. It is this primitive mechanism which still controls our instinctive reaction to foreign nations. The completely untravelled person will view all foreigners as the savage regards a member of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied international politics, will have discovered that, if his herd is to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds.

Pierre Bourdieu photo

“Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees with different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.”

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher

Source: Equisse d'une Théorie de la Pratique (1977), p. 164; as cited in: Jan E. M. Houben (1996) Ideology and Status of Sanskrit, p. 190

Related topics