Sandra Cisneros Quotes

If we were multilingual, imagine how much you would learn about your own culture, about the sensibilities of what's important in your own culture.

When I say what I'm reading, this is what I need. I know the ills that plague me.

I think that we need to measure how we give dollars to libraries by need. And the communities that are poor, in my opinion, should get more because you have to do more outreach.

I prefer to go to the little towns now, because in little towns people are kind. I like going to Tepotzlán.

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.

I want to write an essay called "Fear of Mexico," because I always feel like Mexico's this lover that never writes to me.

I don't really think our government at heart wants peace. So I urge you, write to Mrs. Laura Bush, because she reads.

Why don't we have people like Thich Nhat Hanh or Marshall Rosenberg and Nelson Mandela solving violent situations in a peaceful way?

Marshall Rosenberg talks about how we can create peace in the communities we work with. He's been traveling to warring nations to create peace within those countries.

I was interested in cross-pollinating the two. I thought there was something lovely in the little vignette forms. I wanted to explore that.

Think about the books that you were reading at a certain crisis in your life, what you were reading, and that's because you needed them to nourish your alma.

Sometimes hearing the stories is going to change people's lives much more than if they read it.

Every book takes you to the terror, that terrible place of possible failure.

I think the erotic is very spiritual, and I never see that spiritual dimension when you look at collections of erotica. That's always missing for me.

Afterwards, people come and say, "I felt like you said that just to me. What you said is something I'm going through right now," so you know that spiritual connection is going on.

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.

I remember when they started publishing Latino fiction years ago. You had to be really good to get published. Now you don't have to be that good.

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.

To tell you the truth, I think it's about that we shouldn't get our driver's licenses till real late in life.

What do we call our Harlem Renaissance? Maybe in the future, it won't be just Latino, maybe it'll be more multi-multi, because, you know, people are such fusions now, of so many different cultures.

My Spanish is a daughter's Spanish. I write, but my Spanish really is very limited.

I have this great fear of Mexico City. I won't go to Mexico City unless someone meets me at the airport and is with me. I just feel very vulnerable there.

The comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.

When you have a flourishing of the economy you have a flourishing of the arts.

The TSA tears through your bags at the airport and the NSA watches what books you buy and what you say over the telephone and online. It doesn't feel like anything is private anymore.

When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.

It's difficult for me to have a large story, a very large story - a novel is a large story. I'm used to writing and doing these little miniature paintings.

Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.

I have to understand what my strengths and limitations are, and work from a true place. I try to do this as best I can while still protecting my writer self, which more than ever needs privacy.

Everywhere I go, it's me and me. Half of me living my life, the other half watching me live it.

Once you tell a man he's pretty, there's no taking it back. They think they're pretty all the time, and I suppose, in a way, they are. It's got to do with believing it.

All of my work is influenced by fairy tales, and I hope my work shows Hans Christian Anderson's influence.

In English, my name means hope. In Spanish, it means too many letters. It means sadness. It means waiting. It is like the number nine, a muddy color.

I realize that when I moved out of my father's house I shocked and frightened him because I needed a room of my own, a space of my own to reinvent myself.

Once people are not here physically, the spiritual remains. We still connect, we can communicate, we can give and receive love and forgiveness. There is love after someone dies.