Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sandra Cisneros
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: December 20
Arts Administrator
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Something
Solitude
Good
Wait
Think
Minutes
Orally
Thinking
Waiting
Condemned
Life
Stories
Sentence
Like
Take
Dancer
People
Feel
Sentences
Feels
Minute

More quotes by Sandra Cisneros

Image
I usually meditate and I call my spirit allies - anyone in the spirit world that I've got connections with. Even in the spirit world you need connections!
Sandra Cisneros
Image
Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
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.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
I usually say Latina, Mexican-American or American Mexican, and in certain contexts, Chicana, depending on whether my audience understands the term or not.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
I think I didn't know what I was creating, as much as I knew what I didn't want to do. And I didn't want my mother's life. She was an unhappy, frustrated artist who always dreamed of a life that was never going to be hers.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
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.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
I don't just want to talk to the choir. I want to sit down and be respectful of the people who are most unlike me, to get them to hear me and think. It doesn't mean you're going to change them right there, but just so they can hear you and what you're saying.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
Some people need flowers, some people need dandelions. It's medicine, it's what you need at that time in your life.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
The truth has a strange way of following you, of coming up to you and making you listen to what it has to say.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
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
Image
We changed it to emocionó, the way you say in Spanish, to emotion me [to be moved]. That, as opposed to haunt. We wanted the feeling of sadness and grief and obsession, so we used emocionó.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
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.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
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.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Don't be afraid to say what you don't know, and speak for what you do know. Say, I can't speak for all Latinas, but I can speak for me and tell you very, very honestly.
Sandra Cisneros
Image
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.
Sandra Cisneros