Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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When I'm starting to feel, "How many more people are there?" I go slower. I ask questions, and that person engaging with me gives me energy.
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I know there are a lot of women who are afraid of driving on highways.
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I think of reading as like a medicine cabinet.
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You know how sometimes you meet writers that are so full of themselves? They feel really proud that they wrote something . But what they don't understand - and I like to tell this to writers - is that writing is like fishing. It's just like fishing. If you don't fish that often, you're not going to catch that many fish.
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To me, the Virgen de Guadalupe is just a vessel for me to recognize my own God within myself.
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The thoughts of letting go of everything I love overwhelms like a tsunami of sorrow.
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You don't want somebody who doesn't know his own heart, do you? You'll find someone who's brave enough to love you. Someday. One day. Not today.
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Something I always tell students is, when you're writing something, you want to write the first draft and you want it to come out easily in the beginning. If you're afraid to say what you really have to say, you stammer. [...] 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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I'm not afraid to say what I'm afraid of. Does that make me fearless?
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If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.
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I usually say Latina, Mexican-American or American Mexican, and in certain contexts, Chicana, depending on whether my audience understands the term or not.
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I had no concept of this healthy food until very, very late in life, thanks to a trainer/nutritionist that I met who has been working with me since I was forty-five.
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When I was a child, I was very shy, and there's still a part of me that's very shy.
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The only reason we write - well, the only reason why I write; maybe I shouldn't generalize - is so that I can find out something about myself. Writers have this narcissistic obsession about how we got to be who we are. I have to understand my ancestors - my father, his mother and her mother - to understand who I am. It all leads back to the narcissistic pleasure of discovering yourself.
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In the past I was very open and very generous, and I found that it just exploded in my face. A lot of people weren't there for me when I needed them. So I have become a little shell shocked. Subsequently almost paranoid and frightened of people now. Maybe I'm losing out in meeting some marvelous people, but I am doing the only thing I can to save my spirit.
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When I was writing Caramelo the last couple of years, a sixty-hour work week was normal. And now I'm lucky if I have eight hours.
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People like to blame Mexican food, but look at what's happening globally, look at all the fast foods and products filled with trans fat. Before the Mexican Revolution, a hundred years ago, people were eating what now macrobiotics tells us to eat, corn, black beans, rice. That's what people were eating - and chile peppers. That's a healthy diet. And also they ate a lot of vegetables.
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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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I don't close myself to the possibility of someplace outside the United States, but it would have to be someplace with an indigenous community, because that's where I feel at home.
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I didn't marry. I didn't have children. I followed the food supply for jobs. I kept writing at night. And that kept me moving. It kept my life disruptive. It broke up many relationships. Was it worth it? Yes.
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Even though it's hard to believe, but people who know me really well know I'm shy. I have to go past that fear.
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There are two things you need to ask for, to open up that channel, so you get the light. One is humility, because our ego is always going to block that guidance, and so you ask for humility.And the second thing you're going to ask for is courage, because what you're going to be asked to do is bigger than what you think you can do.
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I think there's some great stuff coming. I do feel that. I think we have reached our Harlem Renaissance.
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It's what's available to the poor communities. They do buy healthy stuff, you know, but the lettuce is usually iceberg lettuce and to get any taste, they have to use all that ranch dressing.