Ilan Stavans Quotes

I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases.

I would be honored if someone reads my books and it inspires them to write their own work.

poetry is where the language is renewed.

Literature usually begets literature.

I appreciate people who try and use language in an interesting way.

Comics could use more creators with something worthwhile to say.

I want to be remembered as a storyteller.

I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.

I see my career as not just music, but as hopefully an entertainer on all mediums, and someone who can have real influence and make great art.

It is interesting the way you create something and send it out into the culture, and then the culture kind of goes berserk.

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

I'm inspired by nonmusical things a lot, whether it's a film or a book or whatever.

I read 'The Young Landlords' and felt almost a chemical change. What I realized while reading that book was that I could write in my voice, use my tongue, my language, my style, and write a story.

And if you think this young boy, from Dallas, Texas, is adding to the canon of theater arts, of performing arts, of cinema, well I'm humbled and I'm very excited.

Terrorists are people, too - they are given to error. Naipaul and then DeLillo do a good job in their novels of drawing this out: I'm thinking of DeLillo's contention in 'Mao II' that terrorists have replaced writers as the people who 'alter the inner-life of the culture.' I thought that was marvellous!

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.

Toni Morrison was a big influence on my work since I was a teenager, what she did with English. I joke that I think she speaks 20 Englishes simultaneously, that she knows how to do that.

In 2011, 'Yourself in the World,' a book of my writings and interviews, was published in conjunction with a retrospective of my work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The goal every day of my life is to make some sort of artistic difference on a more profound level than just moshing.

You really have to do your job as a writer and push people to be as creative as possible. What's nice about the TV medium is you have such a connection to the characters that when somebody dies, the audience cries. They really feel it. You really don't cry when someone dies in a horror movie.

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

I've coined new words, like, misunderstanding and "Hispanically".

The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs -- putting in his oar, so to speak -- with some pat word or sentence.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.