Junot Diaz Quotes

My folks came to U.S. as immigrants, aliens, and became citizens. I was born in Boston, a citizen, went to Hollywood and became an alien.

I'm an immigrant and I've always wanted to write something about America.

We are a nation of immigrants - all of us.

I didn't choose to come to the United States, but being raised here has shaped exactly who I am today, and I can't imagine that being taken away from me.

I'm child of immigrants.

America was founded on immigrants. The immigrant experience is common to all of us.

I consider myself a brown American or a man of color before I would say Sri Lankan, to be honest. I didn't grow up there. There was a pretty brutal civil war there from 1983 until 2009. So we weren't able to go back very much. I've gone back as an adult. But I grew up in Pennsylvania.

I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It's part of who I am as well.

People tend to forget that in our country, we'd pretty much all be immigrants, except for the Native Americans.

Every single immigrant is part of a larger history that needs to be communicated in all its ambivalences and complexities.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.

My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

As you watch 'Documented' on CNN, I ask you, my fellow Americans: What do you want to do with me? What do you want to do with us? How do you define American?

Once you are an immigrant, you never forget that you are one.

My parents were immigrants.

New York is not going to be a foreign place to me. They didn't revoke my visa.

People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects.

The Jews who have arrived would nearly all like to remain here.

I was born in the U.S., my wife was born in Mexico and emigrated here when she was in college, and my daughters were born in New York City. That makes them passport-carrying, natural-born, eligible-to-run-for-president Americans. But they're also Mexicans and they like that just fine.

For the tidal wave of new immigrants Canada is more a land for the realization of private dreams than for maintaining a ... compact between founding races. No common identity was provided for the millions of new Canadian immigrants other than a week vision of mutual multi-cultural indifference.

Too many people are willing to turn their backs on our immigrant past.

Our country is a country where immigration is history and it is a country where immigration is destiny.

My whole family has been having trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.