Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
If you want to live in Tennessee, God bless you, I wish for you a long life and starry evenings. But that… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
You learn in America to speak two ways. You learn in public discourse not to be very specific about your religious life.… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
But very early in life I became part of the majority culture and now don't think of myself as a minority. Yet… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Though I am alive now, I do not believe an old man's pessimism is nessessarily truer than a young man's optimism simply… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
“The boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak English, twenty years later concluded his studies in the stately quiet… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
I regret that I was never an athlete. I regret there isn't time in life. I regret that so many of my… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Of course, since we don't see the Indian as a living figure - having turned the Indian into a kind of mascot… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
I don't deny people their fantasy life, but I do think that we desperately need to start realizing just how complicated our… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
I became a writer not because my father was one - my father made false teeth for a living. I became a… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn't forget that schooling was changing me and separating me… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
In the Sacramento of the 1950s, it was as though White simply hadn't had time enough to figure Brown out. It was a busy… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Mexico is sex and Canada is mind. There is much about Canada that I find admirable - the treatment of immigrants, for example, particularly… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to me -… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
I have a good black friend who is a doctor, but he didn't become a doctor because he saw other black men who were… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
I think the universities have co-opted the intellectual, by and large. But there is an emerging intellectual set coming out of Washington think tanks… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper's,… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
