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You meditate and then you can put on your pajamas, or you can imagine you're wearing your pajamas, and you talk about your piece of writing in the language you would use if you were wearing your pajamas and you were seated at a table with your very good friend. And you wouldn't have to get all dressed up or clean up the table.

Sandra Cisneros

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Sandra Cisneros
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: December 20
Arts Administrator
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Language
Tables
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Good
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More quotes by Sandra Cisneros

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The border between the dead and the living, if you're Mexican, doesn't exist. The dead are part of your life.
Sandra Cisneros
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Your prospective employer, or the person you have a crush on, or the person you want to talk to. You're judging yourself, you know, thinking about your listener. You're not thinking about what you're saying. And that same thing happens when you write.
Sandra Cisneros
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If you can't fall asleep, learn how to meditate. I would recommend you listen to a beautiful tape called Spiritual Power, Spiritual Practice [Energy Evaluation Meditations For Morning and Evening, 1998]. It was the one that got me out of my writer's block when I was writing Caramelo. It's by Carolyn Myss.
Sandra Cisneros
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You don't have to be the specialist on everything. You can try to inform yourself.
Sandra Cisneros
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I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate
Sandra Cisneros
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My Virgen de Guadalupe is not the mother of God. She is God. She is a face for a god without a face, an indigena for a god without ethnicity, a female deity for a god who is genderless, but I also understand that for her to approach me, for me to finally open the door and accept her, she had to be a woman like me.
Sandra Cisneros
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What I recommend is this: after you've talked to everybody, go take a nap! Take a nap. Your body really needs to sleep. It's like washing your face. If you can't afford a three-hour nap, do a one-hour nap. If you can't afford a one-hour nap, do half an hour. If you can't afford half an hour, do fifteen minutes.
Sandra Cisneros
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Every book changes my writing because I'm always trying to do something I didn't do before. I try to do what's hard for me, what I haven't done in the past.
Sandra Cisneros
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We tend to think of orphans as being the protagonist of stories we read when we're kids, and yet here you are: you're an adult, you're supposed to manage, you're supposed to get over it, you're supposed to go on with your life, and you feel like a lost child.
Sandra Cisneros
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San Antonio drives me crazy, but Chicago drives me crazy in a different way.
Sandra Cisneros
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My readers are as diverse as any group you will ever see. Something that booksellers always tell me. That they are always surprised at the kind of people that come to my readings. That they are such a mix of ages and colors. It looks like people spilling out of an elevator.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Sandra Cisneros
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I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.
Sandra Cisneros
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I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Sandra Cisneros
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I never know what something is going to be until it emerges from the womb and you see the crown of its head and then you see it pushing its way up. So in my life if another book wants to be born it's not for me to choose.
Sandra Cisneros
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If you have potato chips, that means, Who's coming over?Wealthy people - white people who're wealthy - have a bag of potato chips that's folded over with a clip. What? There's some left over? In my house, if there was a bag of potato chips, we'd pour it in a bowl and everybody would just dip in till it was gone.
Sandra Cisneros
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I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Sandra Cisneros