Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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You know how women have this clock when they want to have a baby? I had this clock where I wanted to win a national award by thirty, be at a big press by thirty-five. I was always working with these self-driven goals.
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People want you to be the ambassador of everything. This happens to me especially when I go to Europe. I have to be the ambassador of everything. I learned this from Elena Poniatowska - intelligent woman, great lady, one of my heroes, one of my spiritual mentors, I love her. Someone is in this big museum and they ask her, "Elenita, what do you think about Mexican women . . ." And she says, "I haven't a clue!"
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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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I look at Thich Nhat Hanh and I look at Marshall Rosenberg, and they're more concerned about the long range. And that long range means that you have to sit down with people who don't think like you. I want to reach people who don't think like me.
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You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.
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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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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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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 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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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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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 was very lucky. I don't know German, or Dutch, or Chinese, or Thai. I don't know them, so I can't judge, so I have to go on the word of the publisher that it's a good translation.
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That's why it's important to be multilingual, because it teaches you so much about your own language.
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When we started publishing, you had to be better than good. You had to be excellent. But as long as people are reading, I don't care what they're reading.
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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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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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The older I get, the more I'm conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but the world is made up of tiny matters, isn't it?
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And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.
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When I was at home, I wasn't shy. I was the clown at home, because I was loved. It was in the outside world that I was judged and I wasn't loved. That was very clear to me, that I wasn't loved. So I became very quiet. You know, those little girls you see in those pictures that look like they want to hunch, I was trying to disappear into my shoulder blades. The quietest person in the classroom, that was me. But that wasn't me at home.
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I feel like I am in a box of bees when I am in a room with lots of people and I'm just looking for the door. I find myself getting more and more agoraphobic as time goes on.
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Well, when you're an immigrant writer, or an immigrant, you're not always welcome to this country unless you're the right immigrant. If you have a Mexican accent, people look at you like, you know, where do you come from and why don't you go back to where you came from? So, even though I was born in the United States, I never felt at home in the United States. I never felt at home until I moved to the Southwest, where, you know, there's a mix of my culture with the U.S. culture, and that was why I lived in Texas for 25 years.
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When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.
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The truth has a strange way of following you, of coming up to you and making you listen to what it has to say.
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That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.