Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.

Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It's one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they're the four hugest words in the world when they're put together. You can do it.

I end up feeling like a spy in the house of ethnicity, you know? Because people will talk around me as they would talk around the people in their cultural group. So I get to hear all the secrets and jokes and you know, I'm a part of every community because of the way I look.

Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.

A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.

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

My father was a basketball player, so I loved basketball because he did. It was a direct transference. But, more than that, basketball, in the United States at least, plays the same function that soccer does everyone else in the world. It's the sport of poverty. It's the sport born of poverty. It's the cheapest sport.