Sandra Cisneros Quotes
-
If we got an educational program going, we could tell people, "Instead of butter, use avocado." That's something we eat, it has the good fat, and it has a good texture, and it tastes better. Just imagine if you substituted that. Or if we switched to olive oil, the extra virgin olive oil, we could still have our taquitos, but put a little oil on them and put them in the oven and bake them.
-
I am not in touch with other writers. I don't have very much contact with other writers. I don't get invited to these things or I don't go to them. I hate panels. I speak to librarians and to conferences of English teachers. That's what I do: teachers and librarians. And high school kids.
-
When you have a flourishing of the economy you have a flourishing of the arts.
-
I have to say my favorite stories are ghost stories. I don't like to see these made-up monster films or scary films with ghosts. It doesn't do anything to me. But a real ghost story that someone tells me, that I like.
-
You'll change. You'll see. Wait till you meet Mr. Right.
-
I prefer to go to the little towns now, because in little towns people are kind. I like going to Tepotzlán.
-
I think I didn't know what I was creating, as much as I knew what I didn't want to do. And I didn't want my mother's life. She was an unhappy, frustrated artist who always dreamed of a life that was never going to be hers.
-
Perhaps the community you mentioned might not come to the story. Sometimes you have to take the story to them, and perform it, and that's another way that I get an alternate point of view that isn't the official version of history out to a community. I feel that's what I've been doing since Caramelo.
-
How can art make a difference in the world?
-
I don't just want to talk to the choir. I want to sit down and be respectful of the people who are most unlike me, to get them to hear me and think. It doesn't mean you're going to change them right there, but just so they can hear you and what you're saying.
-
Sometimes hearing the stories is going to change people's lives much more than if they read it.
-
When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.
-
People know when you're speaking from el corazón. You have that pain. Take that pain and do something with it. That's very powerful.
-
There's all kinds of ways to wean yourself off of sugar - because it is like an addiction.
-
As Indigenous peoples, we know there is more to the world. We know spirits exist. We know as women, because we're especially attuned to this kind of knowledge, that spirits exist and have a presence in our lives. Some of us are gifted and can communicate with the spirit world. Not everyone has that gift and can perceive the borders between the living and the dead and our society actively discourages us of exploring the knowledge of what many of us have already always known in our cultures.
-
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
-
I think no matter what you do you can't please everybody. You have to ask yourself, "Did I do what I set out to do?"
-
The older I get, the more I'm conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but the world is made up of tiny matters, isn't it?
-
I feel the fear touches on something deeper. A sense perhaps of, "My life is speeding past me and I can't get a handle on it."
-
I do travel a lot, because I need oxygen, I need to go to places to meet people who aren't upset at me because I'm asking for peace.
-
I didn't intend to be writing - the writer's life. I was just writing what came to me at the time, but it is a map of how this writer had to break many barriers to find, not a room of her own, but a house of her own.
-
Generally if you're a daughter in a Mexican family, no one wants to tell you anything; they tell you the healthy lies about your family.
-
Everything that I write comes when it wants to, out of its own need and it dictates its form. I don't say, "I am going to write a novel."
-
A lot of people mistake the persona that I create in poetry and fiction with me. A lot of people claim to know me who don't really know me. They know the work, or they know the persona in the work, and they confuse that with me, the writer. They don't realize that the persona is also a creation and a fabrication, a composite of my friends and myself all pasted together.