Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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The experience taught me to be present in the real Buddhist sense of paying attention to the moment.
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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.
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I would drive on streets that were one-way and think, "Why are they all honking at me?"
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I know the American Library Association has models for working with the poor. They do have that, and I think that we really need to put our efforts - if we want to think long-range and invest in the community so that we don't have to, you know, invest in prisons - into making a change, because I know that the library can make a change in a life, because it made a change in mine.
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I prefer to go to the little towns now, because in little towns people are kind. I like going to Tepotzlán.
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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?
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When you have a flourishing of the economy you have a flourishing of the arts.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.
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You'll change. You'll see. Wait till you meet Mr. Right.
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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.
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Sometimes hearing the stories is going to change people's lives much more than if they read it.
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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.
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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.
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If educators were really understanding of that, they'd say, "You know what? Forget about bilingual, we're going to do multilingual education." So children are ready for the new millennium. We're way behind compared to countries in Europe. If we were multilingual, imagine how much you would learn about your own culture, about the sensibilities of what's important in your own culture.
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Write about what makes you different.
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Spanish is a poetic language, in particular the Spanish of Mexico which has a wonderful animistic attitude you might not see in the Spanish of the peninsula. I think it has to do with the indigenous way of looking at nature.
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I was raised a Catholic, but with very liberal parents, so I had to find my spirituality. I've been looking for it since I was a child. I would find it in pieces of art, music, flowers, trees. Now I've come full circle finding God in clouds, flowers, and trees.
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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."
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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."