Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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Perhaps the greatest challenge has been trying to keep my time to myself and my private life private in order to do my job. Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.
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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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My trainer taught me, because he's Iranian, and that's a beautiful snack pistachios. I have some with me, actually, in my bag. You could eat that on a plane instead of the salted nuts. And a serving size a day is the size of your hand, not the size of your head!
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Even if you don't believe in God, you have to believe in love.
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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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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 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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Every single house has had death visit.
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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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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?"
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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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Sometimes hearing the stories is going to change people's lives much more than if they read it.
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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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I began writing as an experimental writer.
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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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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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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 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'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.