Sherman Alexie Quotes

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.

I got hundreds of emails insulting me, accusing me of being some caveman. I am by no means a Luddite. I have two iPods. I have a cell phone. I have cable TV, HDTV!

If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.

And none of these people, not one of them, had loved any of the others well enough. Failures, he thought, we're all failures... He wanted his love to be the wine and bread, and the blood and flesh. He reached for her, a dangerous stranger in a city of dangerous strangers, but she turned away from him and walked unsteadily through the crowd. How many loveless people walk among the barely loved?

Is God a man or a woman? God could be an armadillo. I have no idea.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

Books and beer are the best and worst defense.

They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We're the United Nations of juvenile delinquents.

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

I've learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children

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

[F]rank knew he was guilty of arrogance and misanthropy, but he compensated by being kind to strangers and tipping really well at restaurants.

What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.

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.

Like officer Dave.He's never said much about his life, but I can tell he's scarred. And he knows I'm scarred too. The wounded always recognize the wounded. We can smell each other.

Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.

Ialways think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians. So I'm never quite sure why we eat Turkey like everybody else. (101)

I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.

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

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

Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito.

My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room.

I learned how to stop crying. I learned how to hide inside of myself. I learned how to be somebody else. I learned how to be cold and numb.

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?

Every Indian kid has access to MySpace and Facebook. But that doesn't mean they have access to books and great teachers. This idea about bringing digital tech into schools is great, but once again I'll say that this is not how people actually learn.

Poetry = Anger x Imagination

Last September 16th, I was walking in downtown Seattle when this pick-up truck pulls up in front of me. Guy leans out the window and yells, "Go back to your own country," and I was laughing so hard because it wasn't so much a hate crime as a crime of irony.

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

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

And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God.

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.

He made me realize that hard work--that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task--is joyous

I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn't have a telescope, so I was just an idiot.

In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.

Reardan is the rich white farm town that sits in the wheat fields exactly 22 miles away from the Rez. And it's a hick town I suppose filled with farmers and rednecks and racists cops who stop every Indian that drives through. During one week when I was little dad got stopped three times for DWI- Driving While Indian.

If you teach kids how to tell stories, they have a better chance at everything.

I guess a witness is all I am. I think as a writer, you're pretty removed. Writing is a very selfish, individualistic pursuit. So in that sense I'm a witness because I'm not participating.

I don't have to participate in another culture's ceremonies in order to respect that culture.

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

I'm quite aware of my differences. I wouldn't classify them as weird

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

When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.

Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is.

I am extremely conscious of my tribalism. And when you talk about tribalism, you talk about living in a black and white world. I mean, Native American tribalism sovereignty, even the political fight for sovereignty and cultural sovereignty is a very us versus them. And I think a lot of people in this country, especially European Americans and those descended from Europeans don't see themselves as tribal.

If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.

I believe in any kid's ability to read any book and form their own judgements. It's the job of a parent to guide his/her child through the reading of every book imaginable. Censorship of any form punishes curiosity.

The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.