Quote

I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.

Junot Diaz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Junot Diaz
Age: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Didn
Kids
Enough
Dominican
Category
Categories
Neither
Safe
Black

More quotes by Junot Diaz

Image
Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for.
Junot Diaz
Image
I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.
Junot Diaz
Image
You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.
Junot Diaz
Image
Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.
Junot Diaz
Image
For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.
Junot Diaz
Image
Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
Junot Diaz
Image
Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known.
Junot Diaz
Image
I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.
Junot Diaz
Image
Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.
Junot Diaz
Image
I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.
Junot Diaz
Image
I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
Junot Diaz
Image
A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve.
Junot Diaz
Image
Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
Junot Diaz
Image
I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.
Junot Diaz
Image
My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place.
Junot Diaz
Image
In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work.
Junot Diaz
Image
As an artist you're on a journey of discovery and sometimes that journey takes a long time, doesn't subscribe to [a] train schedule, to the punch-clock. And I need to read a lot to make my pages happen.
Junot Diaz
Image
You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
Junot Diaz
Image
So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.
Junot Diaz
Image
I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.
Junot Diaz