Quotes By Sherman Alexie

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

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror.

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

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

Spiritual matters should be private.

Writing is a lonely business.

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

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.

You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

My father is an amazing man.

I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.

In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.

I look more Indian when I'm serious.

I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators.

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

I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.

Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion.