My name is Sherman J. Alexie Jr., and I am an insomniac.

In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.

Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?

Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.

That's the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people.

That's one more thing people don't know about Indians: We love to talk dirty.

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