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

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
Writers
Courage
Fear

More quotes by Sandra Cisneros

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I began writing as an experimental writer.
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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I can't go to Hindu countries where they respect rats and mice, and I can't go camping. I don't like to go into subways, because I always see them. Rats are like my naguales [kindred animal spirits]. They follow me.
Sandra Cisneros
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I realize that it's like spices in the kitchen. I need that turmeric. I'm sorry, but cinnamon isn't going to substitute . I feel that I can teach my listener about a new word they can use too. Well, what words are part of my own community, even if I'm monolingual, that I'm not allowing myself to use in a public sphere?
Sandra Cisneros
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I was interested in cross-pollinating the two. I thought there was something lovely in the little vignette forms. I wanted to explore that.
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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Like all guests, after a fortnight, grief is best beyond the door.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Sandra Cisneros
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I think that it's not enough to do the little Band-Aid things of having celebrities come and read to children. Not that we don't need to read to children, but we don't need to just do it one time and feel good about it. I think we need to think long range about poor people and their relationship to libraries.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Sandra Cisneros
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You'll change. You'll see. Wait till you meet Mr. Right.
Sandra Cisneros
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I try to be as honest about what I see and to speak rather than be silent, especially if it means I can save lives, or serve humanity.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Sandra Cisneros
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You know, you want to be outrageous when you're young, so all the young people say, Oooh . . . Now my tactics are different.
Sandra Cisneros
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I learn through listening and watching other performers that are very good, like Denise Chávez, Dorothy Allison.
Sandra Cisneros
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The experience taught me to be present in the real Buddhist sense of paying attention to the moment.
Sandra Cisneros
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You get good at being by yourself and you're condemned to a life sentence of solitude. You think, Wait a minute! I should have been a tap dancer or something. But in my life, I feel like I take my stories to people orally.
Sandra Cisneros
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You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.
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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One of the books that has guided me in the last ten years of my life to help me to be that leader is the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace. He's a Vietnamese monk. He was nominated for a Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King.
Sandra Cisneros