Quotes By Sherman Alexie

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.

I think that white women are more apt to read laterally. So I think there's some strong identification for women, and their political and social positions, and minorities. I think that the political power of, let's say, the average Indian man and a white woman are pretty equal.

Spiritual matters should be private.

All art is exploitation.

I don't have to participate in another culture's ceremonies in order to respect that culture.

The people who loved me when I was seven years old love my books, and the people who didn't like me when I was seven years old don't like my books.

My father is an amazing man.

I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.

In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.

I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.

I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.

I look more Indian when I'm serious.

I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators.

The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.

I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.

Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion.

Don't live up to your stereotypes.

All I owe the world is my art.

Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.