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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.

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
Firsts
Nothing
Goofy
First
Draft
Think
Probably
Thinking
Stuff
Mother
Anything
Able

More quotes by Sandra Cisneros

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Every book takes you to the terror, that terrible place of possible failure.
Sandra Cisneros
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Perhaps the community you mentioned might not come to the story. Sometimes you have to take the story to them, and perform it, and that's another way that I get an alternate point of view that isn't the official version of history out to a community. I feel that's what I've been doing since Caramelo.
Sandra Cisneros
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I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.
Sandra Cisneros
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When you're in that state of grief, any little breeze, any hello, any confrontation, any grazing of someone meeting your eyes, might cause you suddenly to burst into grief. You could be looking at a jar of peanut butter in the supermarket, and then start crying.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Sandra Cisneros
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Some people need flowers, some people need dandelions. It's medicine, it's what you need at that time in your life.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Sandra Cisneros
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The more you speak more languages, the more you understand about yourself. It's like being blind. You aren't less of a person, but you're missing out on wonderful things.
Sandra Cisneros
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This is the age of fear and so many of us feel afraid to speak out about what has happened to our lives in the wake of 9/11. Television promotes the world as a scary place for the United States and this justifies peeling away every element of privacy we had before. The media is monopolized so we don't even hear a lot of dissent about this new era.
Sandra Cisneros
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The ego's blocking the light from coming.
Sandra Cisneros
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I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.
Sandra Cisneros
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I began writing as an experimental writer.
Sandra Cisneros
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If you just breathe, and go slower, you will have enough energy. It's really important because there are people who wait in line, and your work has changed their lives. You will need to listen to them because they are also going to feed you and give you confirmation of the prayer you asked before you spoke.
Sandra Cisneros
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But I deal with this by meditating and by understanding I've been put on the planet to serve humanity. I have to remind myself to live simply and not overindulge, which is a constant battle in a material world.
Sandra Cisneros
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Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Sandra Cisneros
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The good thing about Dennis [ Mathis] is, even though he's a white, he respected that I was doing something quirky with my English. He loved it when I would mix up the Americanisms and say, That's water over the dam.
Sandra Cisneros
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There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don't count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.
Sandra Cisneros
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I've been on television saying, ¡Vamos a la biblioteca!. That was great. Nobody had ever asked me.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Sandra Cisneros