Ilan Stavans Quotes

I'm a nomad. A Jewish road warrior. I do not have a concept of home. I wish I did. But I live with the idea that we have to get out of town before dawn.

All my life I have been a nomad.

Home is where I am. Sadly, I don't need a history to be able to exist somewhere. When I was still very young, my father told me: 'Look, we will always have to move, again and again.' I thought that was marvelous! That's how I got used to thinking that life meant starting from scratch, over and over again.

I'm on the road constantly. I'm a nomad. I don't really have a home right now. I don't identify with one place in particular.

I basically live out of my truck - I mean from place to place. I feel more at home in my truck than just about anywhere, which is a sad thing to say, but it's true.

I literally have never lived anywhere longer than two years in my life. I never just stuck anywhere.

I always live in multiple places. I'm never in the same city for seven days.

I kinda grew up in different places. I was just from everywhere.

I went to 13 schools in 12 years. We moved all over the place. Music was the only thing that I could get behind... I wasn't that good at socializing. I'm still not.

This life of being a transient human being has gotten to a point when it's very hard to bear.

I live wherever I happen to be.

I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving.

A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere.

My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school. So I was always moving, I'm still always moving.

I am a rolling stone, never in one place for very long.

I live in too many cities.

I'm a bit of a nomad anyway, so I find it quite easy to settle in places very quickly.

It was the rootlessness that went with being the son of an RAF officer that shaped me. I had been to 11 schools by the time I was 9.

I don't have a place that I call home at the moment because there's no point. I mean, I'm a traveling circus for a while. It's weird. Like, if I wanted to go home, there's nowhere to go. I just go to a hotel. But I've kind of gotten used to it.

Every day, it's a different country, different time zone. If you asked me where home was, I've never felt like I've had that. My idea of comfort is to leave a place. Two weeks is sort of my max.

Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language - how to convey, to say nothing of converge - but an unhousedness of place.

I don't really live anywhere.

Being nomadic isn't sustainable forever. I've gotten to be really good at it.

There was no time when I lived anywhere longer than two years. I was always a social outcast. Maybe I didn't care what people thought because I was like, 'Well, I probably won't stick around here for too long.'

I actually don't live anywhere. I live on the road.