Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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Mice and any rodentia. Guinea pigs. Even rabbits, I can't stand. Rabbits are cousins to rats. It's a class thing. If you had to grow up with rats scampering in your backyard, because the city services were cut in half and the population in your neighborhood doubled, then that also is going to mean that the flora and fauna are going to grow as well. So that's a part of it. That's why I can't go to Hindu countries where they respect rats and mice, and I can't go camping.
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I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate
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Every book changes my writing because I'm always trying to do something I didn't do before. I try to do what's hard for me, what I haven't done in the past.
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I think that it's not enough to do the little Band-Aid things of having celebrities come and read to children. Not that we don't need to read to children, but we don't need to just do it one time and feel good about it. I think we need to think long range about poor people and their relationship to libraries.
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I've come to some balance now and calmness. If anything happened to me and I got hit by a bus - I hope this doesn't happen, but if something happened - my body of work is something I could rest on. I don't feel, "Oh God, I have to hurry up . . ."
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Even my mom. I have to tell her, "If you want a snack, don't go to bed with potato chips. Eat a handful of pistachios and a handful of dates."
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I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.
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Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in
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When you're in that state of grief, any little breeze, any hello, any confrontation, any grazing of someone meeting your eyes, might cause you suddenly to burst into grief. You could be looking at a jar of peanut butter in the supermarket, and then start crying.
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I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.
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God made men by baking them in an oven, but he forgot about the first batch, and that's how Black people were born. And then he was so anxious about the next batch, he took them out of the oven too soon, so that's how White people were made. But the third batch he let cook until they were golden-golden-golden, and, honey, that's you and me.
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Every writer I admire is my teacher. If you look at it, and if you care to read carefully enough and to read and reread a text, you teach yourself something about craft.
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The ego's blocking the light from coming.
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The writer Denise Chávez comments on poor food and what you associate with luxury food items. In fact, she wrote a whole book called A Taco Testimony, and though the title sounds light, it's a heavy book. It's about being working class and what kind of food is available to you that's cheap.
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I realize that when I moved out of my father’s house I shocked and frightened him because I needed a room of my own, a space of my own to reinvent myself.
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I never know what something is going to be until it emerges from the womb and you see the crown of its head and then you see it pushing its way up. So in my life if another book wants to be born it's not for me to choose.
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You want to be able to say anything when you do your first draft, because some of that goofy stuff that you think has nothing to do with it is probably where the mother lode is.
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Don't be afraid to say what you don't know, and speak for what you do know. Say, "I can't speak for all Latinas, but I can speak for me and tell you very, very honestly."
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The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.
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What I've learned is, if I have to go out and speak, the best way to get people's attention is to tell them a story, tell them a story that came from my corazón.
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Thich Nhat Hanh the one that revolutionized Buddhism. Instead of being monks just engaged in meditation, it was active Buddhism. You went out and felt the ills of the community around you. Instead of retreating to a monastery, you were out in the streets working. And he's been a great help to me, just reading his book, so I don't feel helpless about what I can do about all the violence around me.
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My readers are as diverse as any group you will ever see. Something that booksellers always tell me. That they are always surprised at the kind of people that come to my readings. That they are such a mix of ages and colors. It looks like people spilling out of an elevator.
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I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.
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As people who are women, who are Indigenous and live on Indigenous lands, we know, and this is something I understand the older I get, that they don't visit the same way the postman may visit but they do visit. They visit in ways that our modern society often disregards and considers immaterial or unreal.