Motherhood Quote by Sandra Cisneros

"I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog"

Sandra Cisneros, Author

About this Quote

Cisneros sneaks a small joke into a serious origin story: she didn’t become a writer through the sanctioned pipeline of classrooms and credentials, but through the radical intimacy of a public library. The line isn’t anti-education so much as anti-gatekeeping. School is framed as institution; the library is framed as access. One is permission-based, the other is inheritance.

The card catalog detail is the masterstroke. It dates the memory (pre-digital, tactile, communal) and makes ambition adorably concrete. She doesn’t say she wanted literary immortality; she wanted to see her name in an indexed system that decides what counts. The subtext is both yearning and critique: a child from the margins learns early that visibility is a bureaucratic achievement. To be “in the catalog” is to be filed, findable, legit.

There’s also a quiet portrait of maternal intervention that matters culturally. For many writers, the myth is solitary genius; Cisneros credits a mother who escorts her into a civic space designed for everyone but often felt as if it belonged to someone else. In the Chicana literary context, that gesture carries extra weight: it’s not just about books, it’s about claiming a public right to imagination.

The quote works because it collapses big ideas (class, access, canon) into a vivid image of a kid wanting proof she exists in the system. The laugh catches in your throat, because it’s funny and it’s true.

Quote Details

Topic	Writing
Source	Help us find the source
Cite

More Quotes by Sandra Add to List

About the Author

Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is a Author from USA.

17 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"I always wanted to be a writer"

Jung Chang, Writer

"When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer"

David Guterson, Author

"My parents were horrified when I told them I wanted to be an author"

Lloyd Alexander, Writer

"When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else"

Tobias Wolff, Writer

"I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed"

Dan Simmons, Author

"I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant"

Tim Cahill, Athlete

"At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer"

Tanith Lee, Writer

"I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one"

Daniel Pinkwater, Author

"You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't"

Anthony Doerr, Writer

"I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"I went to college, but I learned to write by reading - and writing"

Daniel Pinkwater, Author

"I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot"

Evan Hunter, Author

"I'd always loved to read - and come from a family of readers - but I never thought about writing as a career"

Nora Roberts, Author

Nora Roberts

"For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write"

Laura Hillenbrand, Author

Laura Hillenbrand

"I went to college, though I didn't take many writing courses"

Walter Jon Williams, Writer

"Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today"

Paul Kane, Writer

"I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child"

Margaret Mahy, Author

Margaret Mahy

"You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else"

Grace Paley, Writer

"I just have a thing for writers. Maybe it because I'm just so not a writer"

Patricia Clarkson, Actress

"I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I'd become famous"

Danielle Steel, Novelist