Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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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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Why don't we have people like Thich Nhat Hanh or Marshall Rosenberg and Nelson Mandela solving violent situations in a peaceful way?
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I never paid attention when people said, "That's gotta be poetry. That's gotta be fiction," except when I was in a graduate program, and you had to claim your genre.
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You can try reading books that will help you be a leader, like Marshall Rosenberg and Thich Nhat Hanh. Be very humble and say, "I don't know why. I don't feel qualified, but I accept this role that you gave me, and so help me."
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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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I know the American Library Association has models for working with the poor. They do have that, and I think that we really need to put our efforts - if we want to think long-range and invest in the community so that we don't have to, you know, invest in prisons - into making a change, because I know that the library can make a change in a life, because it made a change in mine.
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There are a few of the authors that I think have made a great big impact on my life. The way I used to do things when I was younger was more about being outrageous, and there was a lot of ego involved in that.
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When I say what I'm reading, this is what I need. I know the ills that plague me.
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There was a time when I used to go to Mexico every year. But then Mexico changed a lot - between 1995 and 2005, Mexico changed a lot.
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My feminism is humanism, with the weakest being those who I represent, and that includes many beings and life forms, including some men.
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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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I was reading Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, and I'm still very, very deeply moved by Gwendolyn Brooks's life and her work.
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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 don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.
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Even if we don't know if God exists, we can be certain love exists, because its power transcends death.
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Even if you don't believe in God, you have to believe in love.
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You know, if you've got nine people that you've got to get a treat for - because you do have sweet food, even if you're poor - you can't go out and buy a Sara Lee cake. You buy the big bag of cookies, those chocolate and vanilla ones with the icing. That has a lot of trans fat in it, but it goes a long way with a lot of people.
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The stories are what no one wants to talk about. So you make up a story because no one is going to tell you the truth.
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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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It's so good for your health to take those naps. I don't know why people brag that they sleep five hours. I'd be ashamed. I'm proud that I sleep nine hours.
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Once you can open yourself to joy, you feel as if you've transformed your sadness into illumination, which is really all that art is. All we want to do is transform the negative emotions into light. We want to compost them into light.
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Post 9/11, we've seen such disastrous policies on the border. I live two and a half hours away from the border, and I've seen changes for the communities there. I feel like it's an occupied zone. We're losing our rights, and both sides of the border are terrified. The Mexican population and the U.S. population are united in fear.
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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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You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.