Quote

Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.

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
Looks
Men
Time
Dominican
Definitely
Told
Women
Look

More quotes by Junot Diaz

Image
Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
Junot Diaz
Image
She's applying her lipstick I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.
Junot Diaz
Image
Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable.
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
I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.
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
I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
Junot Diaz
Image
...sometimes a start is all we ever get.
Junot Diaz
Image
I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy.
Junot Diaz
Image
You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.
Junot Diaz
Image
My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.
Junot Diaz
Image
New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
Junot Diaz
Image
Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.
Junot Diaz
Image
I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films.
Junot Diaz
Image
It took me sixteen years to write.
Junot Diaz
Image
I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.
Junot Diaz
Image
As a Dominican man, you're socialized to be a playboy. You spend a lot of time being taught that women are important, but without the really positive framework of why. You figure out quickly it's because of culo (ass). But there is a sense that it's not that simple.
Junot Diaz
Image
I feel most like myself... after I run - I go out for five miles every morning.
Junot Diaz
Image
Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
Junot Diaz
Image
You can't be a human without seeing.
Junot Diaz