Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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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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San Antonio drives me crazy, but Chicago drives me crazy in a different way.
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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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The devil knows more from experience than from being the devil
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Write about what makes you different.
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I began writing as an experimental writer.
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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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The TSA tears through your bags at the airport and the NSA watches what books you buy and what you say over the telephone and online. It doesn't feel like anything is private anymore.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.