Sherman Alexie

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.

The problem is that too many adults think their kids' lives are simple, or they try to make their lives simple, when their emotional lives are just as complicated as ours. They might have a few less tools to deal with it because they're young, but the emotions are all the same, and the subject matter is all the same.

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.

We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.

Spiritual matters should be private.

All art is exploitation.

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.

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

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

Don't live up to your stereotypes.

When you construct a mix tape, the first song you come out with has to be a barnburner.

But the real interesting stuff is in the cellar and the attic.

One play can change your momentum forever.

I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.

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.

When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.

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

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.

Religious fundamentalists are unaware that freedom of religion necessarily brings with it the freedom to mock religion.

I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture.

If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.

My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.

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.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

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

I don't know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.

Writing is a lonely business.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

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.

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.

The dream he needed most was the dream that frightened him more.