Quotes By Sherman Alexie

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

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.

My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures.

There have been players with Indian heritage, but there hasn't been a Native-American professional basketball player who became a regular for all sorts of social and political reasons.

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

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 was a controversial figure on my reservation when I was a kid. I was mouthy and opinionated and arrogant. Nothing has changed.

My wife was the first romantic partner who understood both American and native parts of me - not so much the positive stuff, but the damage.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian.

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.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

Well, I think the worst part about tribalism is its tendency to fundamentalize, and if I can fight fundamentalism in any of its forms I'm happy.

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.

My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room.

Spiritual matters should be private.

A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.

My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror.

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

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.

Writing is a lonely business.

I look more Indian when I'm serious.

I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants.

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

You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

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