Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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When you speak words that are relevant to people, they automatically shut up and you know you are in the presence of some very magical words. It's a gift when someone can listen and be quiet and not interrupt.
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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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For me, a story's a story if people want to hear it; it's very much based on oral storytelling. And for me, a story is a story when people give me the privilege of listening when I'm speaking it out loud.
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You don't have to be the specialist on everything. You can try to inform yourself.
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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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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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Sometimes I feel I can't quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I'm too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it.
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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 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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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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I can't do a linear novel. I'm just going to write what I need to write.
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True love in Mexico isn't between lovers; it's between a parent and a child. Mexico is a very intense culture of sons adoring their mothers, and this is why I claim that Mexican culture is matriarchal. Because the one constant, faithful, inviolable, holy love of loves - the love of your life - is not your wife or your lover; it's your mother.
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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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As Indigenous peoples, we know there is more to the world. We know spirits exist. We know as women, because we're especially attuned to this kind of knowledge, that spirits exist and have a presence in our lives. Some of us are gifted and can communicate with the spirit world. Not everyone has that gift and can perceive the borders between the living and the dead and our society actively discourages us of exploring the knowledge of what many of us have already always known in our cultures.
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I have to say my favorite stories are ghost stories. I don't like to see these made-up monster films or scary films with ghosts. It doesn't do anything to me. But a real ghost story that someone tells me, that I like.
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I had a mother who walked to the library with me, and you can't walk to a lot of libraries in San Antonio because - guess what? - there are no sidewalks, except in the neighborhoods. And they're across big boulevards, and it's so hot, you can't even walk to the corner. So things like that affect how children can get to libraries. So there are a lot of things involved.
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I think a lot of education has to be involved. If they would have alternative items, so that, say, for a dollar more, you can get breakfast tacos stuffed with egg whites, and olive oil, and avocado; not guacamole, because they put the salt in it. Just ask for fresh avocado slices, and you could have that.
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The ability to be present with every single person and engage was a great model for me of the work that a writer needs to do. Writers, living or dead, still guide me in many ways.
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A lot of people mistake the persona that I create in poetry and fiction with me. A lot of people claim to know me who don't really know me. They know the work, or they know the persona in the work, and they confuse that with me, the writer. They don't realize that the persona is also a creation and a fabrication, a composite of my friends and myself all pasted together.
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We have all this courage as writers, but then there's this fear.
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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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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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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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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.