Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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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.
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That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.
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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."
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I think there's a rule that once you want to live somewhere, you can't find a job.
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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 had to learn quick, because I was performing in Cinco de Mayo festivals with babies crying and people lifting their beers, and you know the feather dancers would come, and they'd say, "What are you, a poet? You're next".
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Write about what makes you different.
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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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Before you speak, get very quiet, do the meditation, say, "Use me as a channel for what needs to get said to this community. This community needs to hear something very important that I'm the only person in the room who can say it. Please help open me so that I'm not frightened and speak through me. Let me be that channel so that I can help heal." You make yourself so humble that you really are like a flute and that music that comes out comes from el corazón. All the people you're connected to from that light that we call love.
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One way to get very humble is to dedicate the work you're going to do to your community.
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Every single house has had death visit.
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That's all you have to ask from yourself writing a book. That it's the best you can do and that you did it without any ego involved and that you did it for somebody else. That's the best you can do.
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I began writing as an experimental writer.
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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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Afterwards, people come and say, "I felt like you said that just to me. What you said is something I'm going through right now," so you know that spiritual connection is going on.
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The ideal for me is to mix it up. When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre.
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Those of us who are writers and have to perform to communities that aren't used to coming to book events, I would recommend taking some theater.
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I don't want to blame anybody, but I just want to tell you that the process of writing is antisocial, so on the days that you have something really important to write, go from lying down directly to your notepad or your computer. Do not talk.
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I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.
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We changed it to emocionó, the way you say in Spanish, "to emotion me" to be moved. That, as opposed to "haunt." We wanted the feeling of sadness and grief and obsession, so we used emocionó.