Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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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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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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I like to think about the bestseller list as, "This is the medicine cabinet of a very sick country." Let me look and see what they're reading that isn't nourishing them.
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You don't have to be the specialist on everything. You can try to inform yourself.
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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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You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.
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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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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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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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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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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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I can't do a linear novel. I'm just going to write what I need to write.
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I think people are much more concerned about money now. There aren't the big advances of the past. You feel the sense of nervousness about the book industry. It's not like before. Not that I knew very much about what it was like because I was a newcomer to it, but I get that feeling that people are more conservative in their book choices and what they are going to publish and what's a sure sell. As opposed to - just like in the economy - a sense of luxury and sense of risk taking ten years ago.
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I don't see any kind of mirror of power, male power, that is, as a form of liberation. I don't believe in an eye for an eye. I don't believe this is truly freedom.
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If you're going to write about the river, you've got to get in.
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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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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 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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We started an organization that's the only sub-organization of the MacArthur Foundation and we are called the Macarturos. Usually when I win something, I'm the only one of my ethnicity to get it, but this time I met all these Latinos, and I was so excited. I'd meet someone and I'd go, "Can you come to San Antonio?" And they'd go, "Oh yeah." And suddenly I had twelve people that said they would come. And I didn't know how it was going to be. And that's how the Macarturos became a reality, where these very generous geniuses come to San Antonio and work together.
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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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If you start thinking about who's going to read it [you're writing], or what grade will you get, or is it going to win that award, or are you going to get into this graduate program, you're blocking the light, and the light is that guidance and love we get when we open up our hearts and are guided by our higher selves, or God, or the Buddha Lupe Buddha and the Virgin of Guadalupe fused together, as they are in the tattoo on Sandra's right arm, or whatever you believe in, or love.
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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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We have all this courage as writers, but then there's this fear.