All I owe the world is my art.

All art is exploitation.

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

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

All I owe the world is my art.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Spiritual matters should be private.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Writing is a lonely business.

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

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.

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

One play can change your momentum forever.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

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

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

I grew up with art from the innocent age of ten - with art, but with no sense of identity.

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

My art became very public.

Riding a race bike is an art - a thing that you do because you feel something inside.

The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

We have often been attracted to the story of the other, the outcast. And he and I just loved working together, so it just kept happening, and our relationship is completely bound up with our work. We enjoy each other's art.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.