Sandra Cisneros Quotes

I think there's some great stuff coming. I do feel that. I think we have reached our Harlem Renaissance.

I've been on television saying, "¡Vamos a la biblioteca!". That was great. Nobody had ever asked me.

You know that you wouldn't take a baby on a plane without diapers, so when you leave your house, take care of you, like you would a baby. Don't leave your house without packing some healthy things.

Even if we don't know if God exists, we can be certain love exists, because its power transcends death.

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.

As an artist, I have to be the ambassador of everything.

I think of reading as like a medicine cabinet.

I wish somebody had told me love does not die, that we can continue to receive and give love after death.

I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate

I was so happy when I went to Rome and I saw that the Romans eat them too, the squash blossoms. [...] No wonder I like the Italians!

I'm learning a lot by reading teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron. They teach me because I feel like I have a responsibility to the communities that I speak to.

Even if you're an agnostic or an atheist, you can create an altar, because an altar is simply paying homage to someone's life and celebrating what they did.

I was reading Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, and I'm still very, very deeply moved by Gwendolyn Brooks's life and her work.

I feel that I can teach my listener about a new word they can use too.

I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.

There's no perfect place, there's no wonderful utopia.

San Antonio drives me crazy, but Chicago drives me crazy in a different way.

Being on a highway, all that speed and aggression, is very terrifying to me.

I feel the fear touches on something deeper. A sense perhaps of, "My life is speeding past me and I can't get a handle on it."

That's why it's important to be multilingual, because it teaches you so much about your own language.

Mexicans don't think of ghosts as haunting you.

There's all kinds of ways to wean yourself off of sugar - because it is like an addiction.

I grew up with this kind of grocery store that caters to the poor. They serve you the worst food.

To this day, on my cheat days from my diet, which are New Year's Eve and my birthday, I buy luxury foods that are very indicative of my class.

One way to get very humble is to dedicate the work you're going to do to your community.

You want to be able to say anything when you do your first draft, because some of that goofy stuff that you think has nothing to do with it is probably where the mother lode is.

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.

I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.

There's a lot of people that need these stories, and they can't come to my book, so I'm going to be the bookmobile and I'm going to come to them.

"You're next, after the feather dancers." And you had to get their attention, because otherwise people would go, "Oh, a poet." You really have to learn.

I learn through listening and watching other performers that are very good, like Denise Chávez, Dorothy Allison.

We have all this courage as writers, but then there's this fear.

[Dennis Mathis] was very sensitive about keeping the unique way that I spoke English - it had a lot of Mexicanisms or Mexican syntax. So you keep it in because it's adding something unique.

Each book gets harder, each book gets harder and harder. I always feel like crying when I have to write.

Those of us who are writers and have to perform to communities that aren't used to coming to book events, I would recommend taking some theater.

Every single house has had death visit.

My mom was a frustrated woman, like so many unhappy women who didn't get the opportunities they wanted.

You know, we should have cards like the deaf have. "Can't talk, I'm writing today."

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.

My book would come out in one language, then it would come out in another language, then it would come out in One City, One Read, and I was always being called away from my desk.

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.

I find myself using Spanish words much more now that I'm older, and I guess I have the authority to do it in public spaces in ways that I felt I couldn't when I was teaching here fifteen years ago.

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.

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.

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.

I just feel that the East and the West are two different worlds. I sometimes get saddened when I see that very few writers of color are published or reviewed in East Coast presses and magazines.

I think there's a rule that once you want to live somewhere, you can't find a job.

That's all you have to ask from yourself writing a book. That it's the best you can do and that you did it without any ego involved and that you did it for somebody else. That's the best you can do.

We women shouldn't get our driver's licenses till real late in life.

To me, the Virgen de Guadalupe is just a vessel for me to recognize my own God within myself.