Junot Diaz Quotes

When I went to college, my goal was to be a college history teacher. I majored in history.

The family's dream was to see me receive a high degree abroad and to return to become a university professor - on the door to my study room, a sign was placed reading 'Dr. Ahmed,' even though I was still far from becoming a doctor.

I was a student at Peking University for close to a decade, while a so-called 'knowledge explosion' was rapidly expanding. I was searching for not just knowledge, but also to mold a temperament, to cultivate a scholarly outlook.

In the Sanghi family, there is no one who has undertaken intellectual pursuits.

I think college is something I want to experience just to have the experience, really. I think about going to college all the time.

When I was in high school I thought I was going to university into psychology.

There was little in my early life to indicate that an interest in biology would become the passion of my academic career. In fact, there was little to suggest I would have an academic career.

I did try to go to college and try to be an English major.

As a kid, I spent every summer bent over a stack of books, obsessively writing detailed reports on each one.

Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.

There were various turning points, but the main one at the beginning was that I was going off to do another degree in the history of art. I would have ended up as some art historian at Sotheby's or something.

After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.

I've had the career experience. I've had the experience of taking care of myself. I'm going to college because I genuinely want to learn.

Following Rice, I went to Caltech for a Ph.D in physics, without any strong idea of what I wanted to do for a thesis topic.

Well, when I was at Leeds it was the best and worst time of my career, because when I was a kid it was my ambition to play for Middlesbrough, where I was born, and my dream to play for Leeds, and everyone said I couldn't have two teams.

I definitely would like to go to university.

To me it was fascinating, the idea of going to university and studying a subject - architecture - that I had already faced in building some small houses.

I went off to the University of California, Santa Barbara, on a boatload of loans, sights set on becoming a doctor or a lawyer.

I spent a lot of time in college. I was just being academic and discovering myself through reason and analysis.

In my mid-twenties, I was with a conducting career, but I had never been to university and I wanted to. There were things I wanted to study in depth. I also wanted to see if I could survive without music.

It was not to learn about politics that I had gone to Cambridge. I was there as a mathematician, having won a major scholarship to Trinity College the previous year. Perhaps if there had not been quite so many things to distract me, I might have remained a mathematician.

I remember, in school during English lessons, I would ask the teacher what were the most difficult books to read, and when she'd say 'Ulysses' or something, I'd run off to the library to check out a copy, eager to attempt the most difficult mountain.

When I was in grad school, I wanted to be in academia forever.

I want to go back to school, get my master's, and do the accountancy thing at last. You know, get back to the dream. The real dream, that is, not the football dream.

They were saying you would be a tremendous addition to the military, and we can get you into West Point with a full scholarship. And I simply said, I want to be a doctor. I really appreciate it.