A Quote by Junot Diaz

For me I was always a smart nerdy kid. I wasn't the smartest and I wasn't the nerdiest, but I was a smart nerdy kid my whole childhood, and I definitely wanted to be somehow involved with reading the rest of my life, and I came from a community, I lived in a community, I was part of a community where reading was considered completely alien.
The cliche of the nerdy kid who doesn't go outside and just plays games is completely untrue. And it's also true for the nerdy kid who studies comic books and turns into this genius, and it is also true for the nerdy kid who listens to every nerdy thing that Led Zeppelin put out. That kind of obsession in a 16-year-old is not ugly. It's beautiful.
I was a pretty nerdy kid. I was pretty nerdy. I'm still kind of nerdy. I have all of the worst qualities of being a nerd - all of the affect and none of the smarts. I'm a useless nerd! That's pretty bad.
Many of the Jews who owned the homes, the apartments in the black community, we considered them bloodsuckers because they took from our community and built their community but didn't offer anything back to our community.
The black community is my community - the LGBT community, too, and the female community. That is my community. That's me; it's who I am.
I think I'm still fed by my childhood experience of reading, even though obviously I'm reading many books now and a lot of them are books for children but I feel like childhood reading is this magic window and there's something that you sort of carry for the rest of your life when a book has really changed you as a kid, or affected you, or even made you recognize something about yourself.
I spend all day replying to tweets and reblogging posts and sharing fan art. I think it's the most important thing I can possibly do, to stay involved in the community as a part of the community, not ahead of the community. I'm very much the same level of them in it.
Reading has helped motivate me to become a spokesperson for programs like the WrestleMania Reading Challenge. It has motivated me to become more involved in my community and to keep learning new things.
I've gone from a kid who was sneaking out of my childhood house and lying to my parents to do shows in a community theatre in Reading, PA, to now having two shows on Broadway opening within two months of each other. That's sort of crazy, that trajectory.
I came up in the community center. I used to be physical director of the South Central Community Center in Chicago on 83rd. It's still there. It used to be around there when I was a kid.
I was always the smallest role in community theater and school plays. I always had two lines - I was the kid that came on stage and said one thing and then left, and that was my part for the play.
Earlier in my college career, there was no doubt in my mind that as a member of the Black community I was somehow obligated to this community and would utilize all of my present and future resources to benefit this community first and foremost.
I think it is completely immoral for a shop to trade in the middle of a community, to take money and make profits from that community and then ignore the existence of that community, its needs and problems.
I think that my first book - I was trying to write the kind of book I would have loved as a kid. So it's sort of, like, a book inspired by my childhood reading and the passion that I felt about reading when I was a kid.
Rap actually took root in the Negro community, and then in the Hispanic community, long before it impacted on the larger American community as a whole.
I have the students for six hours a day. The community has them for 18 hours, plus prenatal and early childhood. I don't believe the schools create (the achievement gap), but our responsibility is not to add to it. We won't eliminate the gap until the community makes education a priority, but the schools can't wait for the community to do its part.
I'm really proud that the LGBT community has gotten behind me because, as I said, I am part of the community, so I do as much as I possibly can for our community and for our rights, so it's nice that everyone is supporting me as well.
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