Junot Diaz Quotes

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

I know that some people, when they are growing up and they - as a person of color in a majority community - that they may feel as if they are left out, or they feel a bit strange.

Black folk who don't realize I'm mixed will treat me like I'm some racist person, or when white people find out I'm black, they treat me with racism, and I don't feel like I belong or fit in anywhere.

The truth is, for me, when I was a young black girl who knew I was different, was watching TV, I would always be staring at the TV set looking for myself, and I didn't see me. And when you don't see yourself, you start to think that you don't matter, or you start to think that something is wrong with you.

I don't want to be white. I don't want to be straight. I don't want to blend in.

I grew up basically in a predominantly, you know, white community and I was mixed but as a kid you don't know that. So I was always different, always stood out and people would always make fun of me.

I was always different from people. Especially being from Kentucky, I always got made fun of.

There's something different about growing up black and Muslim, especially in New Jersey. It's like when I left the mosque and I left my dad, I felt unprotected, but I also felt a weird sense of pride, like I was involved in this other way of living that was cool to me.

I grew up with pretty much nothing - in the hood, the ghetto - whatever you want to call it.

When you never see yourself in the mainstream format, you are stripped of the strength of your identity.

Self-doubt is a constant companion for a chubby, gay, black boy born in the South.

As a person of color from the South, San Francisco was the first city that really made me feel like an other.

I landed in New Jersey, where I could barely speak English, and I had to figure out what a short brown kid was going to do in this big white world.

When I started out, it was rare to see elected representatives with foreign roots. Often, I was relegated to my origins, put in the diversity box: 'You're the new face of diversity.' That annoyed me because I always felt French, and suddenly I was being made to feel I wan't as French as others.

It makes me sad that our kids are growing up in a country where they are American but, in a sense, have to prove it. They can't just be who they are like everyone else. Who they are is something suspicious, something scary, something misunderstood.

People don't realize it hurts my feelings when someone looks at my hair or my eyes, and says, 'But you're not actually black. You're black, but you're not black black, because your eyes are green.' I'm like, 'What? No, no, I'm definitely black.' Even some of my closest friends have said that. It's been a bit touchy for me.

I'm Japanese, and I'm also white American, and neither camp wants me in their camp.

[A pariah is] something like a martyr with more suffering and less class.

It's fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility - this too is part of the work, is indeed central to [my photographs]... This invisibility - this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time - is the greatest source of my longing.

It's very easy for one talking about violence and hatred for the white man to appeal to [Negro from ghetto]. I have never thought of this, but I think this is quite true, that if, even if you talk to them about nonviolence from a tactical point of view, they can't quite see it because they don't even know they're outnumbered.

Michael Jackson was a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich white woman

I know that I am a black man in a white world. . . I know that I never had it made.

I know a lot about being white - because I have to, I live in the white world. A white person doesn't live in the Indian world. I have to be white every day.

I am from the inner city, the ghetto. If I can use my platform to carry on a legacy and talk about something that's real, I have to do that, period.

I’m not anyone,” he says. “I’m nobody. That’s what being factionless is.