Quote

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

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
Men
Contemporary
Bookish
Like
Wings
Tentacles
Smart
Ghetto
Color
Bats
Boys
Pair
Growing
Chest
Feels
Chests
Mamma
Really
Pairs
Mia

More quotes by Junot Diaz

Image
[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.
Junot Diaz
Image
I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Junot Diaz
Image
My art feels like it's real disobedient. I can fill notebooks with observations and maybe they find their way into the work unconsciously, which is great. I've never been able to directly plug, like to take a little snip that I've picked up on the street and transfer it into a story. I don't know what's wrong, but it never works that way.
Junot Diaz
Image
'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.
Junot Diaz
Image
I find reading to be a delight, a source of comfort, a way to explore.
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
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
Privilege does not operate without silence.
Junot Diaz
Image
People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.
Junot Diaz
Image
A person doesn't mourn forever.
Junot Diaz
Image
New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
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 was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.
Junot Diaz
Image
The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.
Junot Diaz
Image
She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.
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
Image
My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.
Junot Diaz
Image
For my first three books the setting (or place if you will) has always been a given - N.J. and the Dominican Republic and some N.Y.C. - so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first.
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
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