Novelists From The United States

"I saw Miguel-Mike who is in his mid-thirties in the novel (born in 1969) struggling with the macho legacies of the men in his family and role models, his white military father and his cantina owning grandfather. At the same time he struggles with how much his ex-wife dotes on their son.…But as far as the novel makes reference to that, Miguel seems to be willing to concede to the mother’s care more than enforce macho authority over the sickly boy. Miguel is a man of the new millennia. He listens to what his significant other opines. As an educated individual, he also turns to literature for answers. He reflects on his failed marriage and tries to learn from it rather than shut down and repeat his mistakes. There is a deep desire to find spiritual and romantic fulfillment. He’s willing to find new ways to do that within the constrictions of society’s patriarchal institutions."

"I see the ‘breast fest’ going on around the world where we see every female’s cleavage, ‘girls’ gone wild’ commercials, not to mention Spring Breaks in the States, their wet t-shirt contests and so forth. I think, this is what we feminists struggled so hard for?"

"It is the nature of all living creatures, including Homo sapiens, I believe, to adapt to a place where they may survive. If that is something we as social beings called home then home it is for my main character in The Guardians, Regina who has plunked down hard earned pennies on a cachito of terreno where she can survive, plants some vegetables to live from, etc."

"A novel begins with a query."

"I made a commitment a half century ago to make my writing my own tool and weapon to fight injustices as I recognized them, and this continues. I am grateful to the gods for it."

"I continue with the agenda I had as a girl, writing to fill in the blanks, spaces, silences and outright lies regarding POC, specifically Latino/a/Chicana/os/Chicanx when and how I am able to do so."

"We can’t assume who speaks what language in these times."

"We think that language is only an aesthetic choice or a matter of personal expression, but for Mexicans and the people in the U.S. who share that history, suppression of our culture is political. This is the reason I choose the language/s I choose, and when."

"Anyone who says the artists and writers they study don’t influence them, directly or unconsciously, isn’t being honest."

"(In one of your essays in the book, from 2012, you write about Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez and say they are "[d]oing no more than supporting and promoting patriarchal and capitalist goals." Do you still feel this way about them, even as they—Beyoncé especially—are often held up as feminist icons?) AC: I do, but I know that I would have a lot of women of color of younger generations argue with me about that. I come from a generation of radical feminism; we believed in not using your body for financial gain and that sexualization fed into violence against women. I know that dates me. The performances that both Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé give are highly sexually charged, and they've made a lot of money off of a lot of men by sexualizing themselves as exotic beauties. Both of them have dyed their hair blonde, straightened it, weaved it, which feeds into a fantasy about women and women of color. I come from a very different perspective, and I don't believe that anything in terms of personal gain or materialism is really helping the rest of the world. If you make that much money, instead of buying a humongous mansion, go back to your community and start community projects and talk to your legislators about changing some of the laws [that mean] young men of color who have felonies because [they dealt] drugs as teenagers can no longer integrate into society. Moving away from Beyoncé and J-Lo—I'm sure they do a lot of good deeds—I'm very lucky I have a roof over my head. I can eat healthy food, my children have coats in cold weather, they have an education. I don't think a human being needs much more beyond that."

"…I always tell people that you have to write what's tearing at your heart, what you need to resolve. I thought it was time to walk my talk. How was I going to write about parts of my life and not write about what really was motivating some of my behavior? I've written long enough to know where the boundaries are."

"I take every risk in writing that I can, because I don't write just to entertain people or make money."

"The issue of mass incarceration, the multi-billion-dollar industry that prisons have become in this country, is important to talk about. The fact is that young people of color are being harassed as much as my generation was 30 years ago despite the civil rights movement and all the other ways that we've brought up race issues in this country."

"“Black Dove” [“Paloma Negra”] is a mariachi song, and we Mexicans love our mariachis; we'd go celebrate Mother's Day or a birthday or something and ask for a song that brings a great deal of sentimental feeling to us individually or the table. That's how I feel with "Black Dove." In the book I explain that it's a song that my mother actually sang as I left home as a young woman. My mother was very traditional, and in her mind, the way a girl leaves home is through marriage—me going out with my little satchel was not how they imagined it. They imagined the worst, that I was going to end up in a cabaret as one of those that dances for a few fellas."

"I'm fairly certain that if you study any poet of any given time, any sex, any class background, the question of searching for identity is there. It's inherent. It is a process of self-understanding, of going through life. Take Pablo Neruda, ambassador for his country, writing poetry reflecting the issues of his life. What I'm saying is that the difference between me and Neruda is that I'm not a man from a middle-class elitist background. My government is not sending me as ambassador so I can go and write poetry in some other place. What is different with women of color is that they are the very last permitted a voice. What we are hearing now is this very unique, silenced, previously censored voice."

"I have a commitment to many of my major characters who have brown skin. That's a commitment to the story of a different character that you're not used to seeing in literature. In Julio Cortázar's work, for example, I can deal with his Latin American history, I can deal with the language, but his women have white, porcelain skin. They're Argentine, probably from a European background."

"You say your city the way some Americans say this is their country. You never feel right saying that - my country. For some reason looking Mexican means you can't be American."

"A good lover will do that, see something worthwhile in you that you never knew was there. And when there's something you don't like to see in yourself a good lover won't see it either."

"Protect him, yes, with my life; spare him of learning responsibility and to take care of himself, no."

"In Lak Ech/tu eres mi otro yo–teaches about the ‘other’ and that we are all each other’s reflection."

"We all participate in patriarchal patterns."

"As disturbing as some of us may find it there seems to be some evidence that the age men are most attracted to is a young teen, 13 to be specific. Women especially are subjected to ageism. Once she is past her twenties, I think a lot of women, let’s say in contemporary Western culture, still fear losing their sexual appeal, i.e., their worth as women…"

"Why is what is natural to women often seen as negative?"

"There’s a fine line between Houston and farce."

"The present is a rope stretched over the past. The secret to walking it is, you never look down. Not for anyone, not even family. The secret is to pretend you can’t hear the voices of the people who have fallen down there in the dark."

"Houston is basically a concrete saucepan full of swamp water. The sun heats it up to a slow boil in May and keeps it simmering through to the end of October."

"What I’m most obsessed with is the tension between the private and the public self. In Cuba, we call it a “doble moraleja” but in reality, it’s more than that. It’s like people have two completely different realities. That’s very hard. Everyone says that it’s a political situation, but in reality it totally affects your life in every way. You start to become complicit in things that are quite terrible…"

"Cuba is at the heart of my fiction, even when it’s just an echo, like in “Kimberle.” I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t remember in some conscious way that I’m Cuban. But my relationship with Cuba changes as time goes by, not just because of changes in Cuba but because of changes in my own life. When my son was born almost six years ago, it totally altered everything. For example, instead of going to Cuba, I spent a great deal more time in Miami, because that’s where my mom lived, and I really wanted my son and my mom to have a relationship…"

"Memory, about the futile struggle to remember. It’s a eulogy to all the people who flee the terrible conditions in their home countries, desperately hoping for a better life here, and never make it."

"When I decided to write a novel, I had two full time jobs and three children under the age of six, so I don’t want anyone telling me they don’t have time to write a book, but I learned to work in the middle of the night, and I still do that…"

"I was a university professor and all of my degrees were in the biological sciences, so I did know my way around a library. That’s why I decided on historical fiction. It seems easier to look things up than to make them up. If it turned out I had no imagination, I could steal things from the historical record!"

"First, a good sex scene is about the exchange of emotions, not body fluids. In other words, what’s going on physically is not really important. It’s what’s going on emotionally that’s important. You use the physical attributes or setting, only as a means of anchoring the reader in the moment, but it’s about what’s going on between these two people. And that leads to the second principle, which is that a good sex scene can only happen between two unique and specific people…"

"I was just looking for a time and place in which to set a historical novel because I wanted to practise writing one. I wasn’t going to show it to anyone, let alone get it published, so it didn’t really matter where I set it. I saw this young man in a kilt and thought that was quite fetching, so why not Scotland in the 18th century?"

"I kept on ignoring him. The dead are only ghosts, after all."

"In short, I was behaving well...but at another level I was just Going Through The Motions. One of the things about being a grown-up is learning how to do that, learning how to act right even when you feel wrong."

"I thought about how the sound of burning and the sound of running water are almost the same."

"Ghosts don’t do things to you. Ghosts make you do unspeakable things to yourself."

"Here in the South, class-action lawyers are what we have instead of unions. Legally speaking, we prefer shoot-outs to sit-ins."

"There are so many different ways lives work out, so many stories, and every one of them is precious: full of joy and heartbreak, and a fair amount of situation comedy. Every life is a movie that starts in color. They just all end in black and white."

"All poets would do well to follow the example of Sandra Cisneros, who takes no prisoners and has not made a single compromise in her language."

"Sandra Cisneros has a gift and an attitude we should all be grateful for."

"A further measure of the importance of the feminism of women of color was the tremendous efflorescence in their fiction. The writings of Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich, among others, played a major role in bringing the feminist message and perspective to the masses of American women."

"Sandra Cisneros…has done so much to help other writers…There had been some earlier Chicano works, like Pocho, a novel that came out in 1959. But none of these earlier works really made an impact that showed that there was a great demand for Chicano literature. I think Sandra Cisneros made inroads there…Sandra wasn't the earliest Chicana writer either. But she was the one who stimulated the interest in Chicano and Chicana writing."

"the poem "Poet's Progress" is to Sandra, reflecting on our lives...There is a great satisfaction that comes from being in the life that one has chosen. When I say, "Save me from a stupid life," I mean an unquestioned life, those unexamined choices that Sandra and I were both expected to make. We both chose poetry, which, to me, is the exact opposite of the stupid life."

"At all times, Sandra Cisneros has penned poetry of utterly divine language and imagery."

"Sandra Cisneros is one of the most brilliant of today's young writers. Her work is sensitive, alert, nuanceful. It is rich with music and picture.""

"A sensitive, compassionate witness, Cisneros re-creates the neighborhood in which she grew up, evoking the smells and tastes and feelings. The effects of sexism, poverty, racism, and the loss of culture and language are told with searing simplicity…Cisneros's telling is relentless, clear in its simplicity. Her anger is palpable, but no words of anger are actually written. Experiences about race and class and sex are put into word pictures. The entrapment of women is drawn in big, thick lines across the page. Sobreviviendo, bearing witness, out of love, so that what has been (and still is) will not be erased. The stories are pieced together like a quilt, arranged so that women can see how it is and has been, can see the lines of connection between themselves as women, as Chicanas, as poor people in the barrio, can think about how they might want it to be, how they could get there. That Cisneros, like Alice Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks, chose to piece her stories like a quilt speaks to the significance of the quilting process as a way of thinking. "Each day is a tapestry," Deena Metzger has written, the piecing a reflection of the structure of daily life."

"I would never want to offend any writer by publicly admitting which books I’ve put down; it’s not the writer’s fault we didn’t click. Maybe the book arrived too early or too late in my life. If I sense a book isn’t likely to make me a better writer or a better human being, I release it. I have to. At 66 I haven’t got a lot of time left before I transmogrify into a maguey."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"For me the great shame and dolor of our times is the story of immigrant children."