Richard Rodriguez

“Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.”

— Richard Rodriguez

In the Sacramento of the 1950s, it was as though White simply hadn't had time enough to figure Brown out. It was…

— Richard Rodriguez

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm…

— Richard Rodriguez

Mexico is sex and Canada is mind. There is much about Canada that I find admirable - the treatment of immigrants, for…

— Richard Rodriguez

My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to…

— Richard Rodriguez

Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there…

— Richard Rodriguez

I have a good black friend who is a doctor, but he didn't become a doctor because he saw other black men…

— Richard Rodriguez

In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I…

— Richard Rodriguez

I think the universities have co-opted the intellectual, by and large. But there is an emerging intellectual set coming out of Washington…

— Richard Rodriguez

You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five…

— Richard Rodriguez

After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published…

— Richard Rodriguez

What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin…

— Richard Rodriguez

We're looking at complexity. We're looking at blond kids in Beverley Hills who can speak Spanish because they have been raised by…

— Richard Rodriguez

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close.…

— Richard Rodriguez

For me, diversity is not a value. Diversity is what you find in Northern Ireland. Diversity is Beirut. Diversity is brother killing…

— Richard Rodriguez

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

The Census Bureau is thinking of creating a new category because so many kids don't know how to describe themselves using the…

— Richard Rodriguez

I keep trying to tell people that Los Angeles is already the largest Indian city in the U.S., that there are Toltecs…

— Richard Rodriguez

If you want to live in Tennessee, God bless you, I wish for you a long life and starry evenings. But that…

— Richard Rodriguez

I think it's an important thing for a Mexican to say, especially now with the rebellion in Chiapas. Mexico has to confront…

— Richard Rodriguez

The average age in the U.S. is now thirty-three, whereas Mexico gets younger and younger, retreats deeper and deeper into adolescence. Mexico…

— Richard Rodriguez

“Most, I loved James Baldwin's essays. There was to a Baldwin essay a metropolitan elegance I envied, a refusal of the livid.…

— Richard Rodriguez

I had an Indian face, but I never saw it as Indian, in part because in America the Indian was dead. The…

— Richard Rodriguez

It is very curious that the United States and Canada both assume that diversity means only race and ethnicity. They never assume…

— Richard Rodriguez

'm constantly depressed by the Mexican gang members I meet in East L.A. who essentially live their lives inside five or six…

— Richard Rodriguez