Ilan Stavans Quotes

born 1961

Ilan Stavans (born Ilan Stavchansky, 1961) is a writer and academic who born in Mexico and now lives in the USA. He writes and speaks on American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures.

Random Ilan Stavans quote

8 quotes

Immigrant life in general is miserable, as one sees in the literature produced by those who experienced the journey.

A life in two languages is a life experienced twice.

Because you live in two or three worlds doesn't mean you don't live in any of them.

Interview (1999)

Reading a classic, I believe, ought to entail an element of foreignness...Classics are windows into an epoch, not only in content but in form.

Interview (2021)

Isn’t that the dream of democracy, to allow its dwellers to have a voice? The only way to achieve that is to allow them to appreciate the voices of the past.

Interview (2021)

I don't think Latinos are a separate nation in the U.S. 'We are entering, belonging and sharing that melting pot with many other minority groups.

Interview (1999)

Without the classics, we are a tabula rasa: we have no memory. We not only open the classics to re-create the past; we also use them to calibrate the present.

Interview (2021)

What I look for in the classics is a message that is reinvented every time a new reader opens it. Along with the author, it is the role of the introducer and artist to make a case for that fresh take.

Interview (2021)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Ilan Stavans (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.