Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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Every single house has had death visit.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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When you have a flourishing of the economy you have a flourishing of the arts.
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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 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.
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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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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.
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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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Your prospective employer, or the person you have a crush on, or the person you want to talk to. You're judging yourself, you know, thinking about your listener. You're not thinking about what you're saying. And that same thing happens when you write.
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The good thing about Dennis Mathis is, even though he's a white, he respected that I was doing something quirky with my English. He loved it when I would mix up the Americanisms and say, "That's water over the dam."
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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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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 began writing as an experimental writer.
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By community I mean that community you have a special vision for, that only you see, that no one else in a room sees. That special community in pain, that through a pain you've suffered, you're able to have that vision, that super-ray vision.
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Sometimes hearing the stories is going to change people's lives much more than if they read it.