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
Safe
Black
Didn
Kids
Enough
Dominican
Category
Categories
Neither

More quotes by Junot Diaz

Image
Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.
Junot Diaz
Image
The world should always be concerned whenever a vast human rights violation occurs anywhere on the planet.
Junot Diaz
Image
Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.
Junot Diaz
Image
I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.
Junot Diaz
Image
The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.
Junot Diaz
Image
Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.
Junot Diaz
Image
Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.
Junot Diaz
Image
In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.
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 African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.
Junot Diaz
Image
The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
Junot Diaz
Image
I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.
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
You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.
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 sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
Junot Diaz
Image
I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.
Junot Diaz
Image
I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished Drown was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.
Junot Diaz
Image
Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.
Junot Diaz
Image
Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.
Junot Diaz