To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?

There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author's title, but people of the book, who really must be around.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth.