Top 229 Quotes & Sayings by Sherman Alexie

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

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

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

The problem is that too many adults think their kids' lives are simple, or they try to make their lives simple, when their emotional lives are just as complicated as ours. They might have a few less tools to deal with it because they're young, but the emotions are all the same, and the subject matter is all the same.

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

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.

All I owe the world is my art.

All art is exploitation.

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.

My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures.

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

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

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

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

Spiritual matters should be private.

I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.

I think that white women are more apt to read laterally. So I think there's some strong identification for women, and their political and social positions, and minorities. I think that the political power of, let's say, the average Indian man and a white woman are pretty equal.

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

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.

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

The dream he needed most was the dream that frightened him more.

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.

In high school I dated a white woman. She would come to visit me on the rez. And her dad, who was very racist, didn't like that at all. And he told her one time, 'You shouldn't go on the rez if you're white because Indians have a lot of anger in their heart.'

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

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

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

Writing is a lonely business.

There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

I don't know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.

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.

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

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.

My father is an amazing man.

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.

When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.

White Americans have a short memory.

Don't live up to your stereotypes.

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

I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.

I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture.

I look more Indian when I'm serious.

Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

Well, I think the worst part about tribalism is its tendency to fundamentalize, and if I can fight fundamentalism in any of its forms I'm happy.

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

I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian.

We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.

The people who loved me when I was seven years old love my books, and the people who didn't like me when I was seven years old don't like my books.

But the real interesting stuff is in the cellar and the attic.

The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.

I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don't write to protect them. It's far too late for that. I write to give them weapons-in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

Most of my heroes are just decent people. Decency is rare and underrated.

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

When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.

He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.

Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.

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.

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

These are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you; your future is 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. Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they’re not necessarily evil, unless you let them be.

"I used to think the world was broken down by tribes," I said. "By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not."