Sherman Alexie Quotes

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

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.

Okay, so maybe I'm romantic... but somebody is supposed to be romantic. Some warrior is supposed to go to war against the imperial forces of cynicism and irony. I am a sentimental soldier.

One play can change your momentum forever.

We are taught to take the bread into our bodies as proof of Jesus's body.

Estranged from the tribe that gives no protection, What happens to the soul that hates its reflection?

What if someone picks on me?" I asked Then I'll pick on them". What if someone picks my nose?" I asked. The I'll pick your nose, too" Rowdy said.

I ain't interested in the truth. I'm interested in the way things should be.

We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we've been lied to.

That's right, I am a book kisser.

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

Spiritual matters should be private.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

We only know how to lose and be lost.

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

Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling," she used to say. "Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?

She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.

You can't sustain [anger]. You become bitter. Nothing's going to change. Anger leads to resentment, then to spiking your orange juice, then to martyrdom.

I suddenly understood that if every moment of a book should be taken seriously, then every moment of a life should be taken seriously as well.

At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future.

Is revenge a circle inside of a circle inside of a circle?

We all have to find our own ways to say good-bye.

My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.

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

In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly.

it's way too early for him to be talking anyhow but I see in his eyes something and I see in his eyes a voice and I see in his eyes a whole new set of words

I drew because words were too unpredictable. (5)

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'm not a pacifist by any measure, but I'm also fully aware that the reasons I might go to war could be very dubious.

Because I'm an American, I know there's all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me.

I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.

Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.

Like any good shaman, professional baseball player, or politician, my mother always answered questions with questions.

I think I was born with a suitcase.

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

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

If I were a doctor nobody would be inviting me to talk to reservations. I'd be a different person. Writers can influence more people.

But we danced, under wigs and between unfinished walls, through broken promises and around empty cupboards.

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

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

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.

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.

I look more Indian when I'm serious.

Only in rock music and the literary world you see so many ugly white guys with beautiful women. That says a lot about the women, their character. They're attracted to more than surface.

and then she asks me how many sexual partners I've had and I say one or two depending on your definition of what I did to Custer . . .

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

I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.

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.