The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific, you know, it's the worst sort of précis of who we are.

I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing Y.A.

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 don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.

I write less about alcohol, less and less and less. You 're an addict - so of course you write about the thing you love most. I loved alcohol the most, loved it more than anybody or anything. That's what I wrote about. And it certainly accounted for some great writing. But it accounted for two or three years of good writing - it would never account for 20 years of good writing. I would have turned into Charles Bukowski. He wrote 10,000 poems and 10 of them were great.

Nobody recognizes that a bookstore or library can also be a drowning polar bear. And in this country [US], magazines, newspapers, and bookstores are drowning polar bears. And if people can't see that or don't want to talk about it, I don't understand them at all.