There has been for many years resentment of Spain as the conqueror, but a lot of things about modern Spain have changed, he said. We should talk abou… - Ilan Stavans

What I want people to engage in, and people already do so, is not only in what others are telling us and what we're telling the others, but in the music that we engage in when we speak. And where that music comes from, language is character, is individual character, is collective character. Language is history too...When we're listening to somebody who doesn't speak exactly like us, it's easy to demonize them, to think that they are less worthy than us. But in the end, we come from that background. We come from others that didn't have the language that we have today. And if we can see the versions, the iterations of the past, in those words, in that music, I think we're going to be more sensitive, compassionate and humble.

sometimes American-Jewish life is too monolingual...But for me Jewish life is multilingual. We don’t experience that in the United States, but if you’re in Israel or in other Diasporas, you hear that a lot.

An accessible language is a language that is beautiful. It is a language of understanding, not of pretension. To be accessible is to write not from Mount Sinai but from below, where the people are. The critic has the exact same words (in English, there are close to a million, according to the editors of the OED) available to write poetry, fiction, theater, autobiography, et cetera.