Sherman Alexie Quotes
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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.
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My books for adults had been previously challenged and banned so I'd had experience with it. I always find it sad and amusing: Sad to think that such archaic and potentially dangerous censorious beliefs still exist, and amused because these censors only make a book more powerful and seductive when trying to ban it.
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In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly.
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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?
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My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures.
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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.
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The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific, you know, it's the worst sort of précis of who we are.
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The cello looks like a woman to me. And, you know, the curves. And so I am in a way, and it's funny to admit this, I am sexually attracted to the cello, the curves really get me. So as I watched him play, you know, Yo Yo Ma is sort of making love to a beautiful woman.
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When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer.
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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.
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We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.
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It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can do about it.
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Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
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I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture.
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When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.
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Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.
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Those Montana Indians were so tough that white people were scared of them. Can you imagine a place where white people are scared of Indians and not the other way around? That's Montana.
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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.
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Religious fundamentalists are unaware that freedom of religion necessarily brings with it the freedom to mock religion.
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I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.
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If you teach kids how to tell stories, they have a better chance at everything.
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I write less about alcohol, less and less and less. You 're an addict - so of course you write about the thing you love most. I loved alcohol the most, loved it more than anybody or anything. That's what I wrote about. And it certainly accounted for some great writing. But it accounted for two or three years of good writing - it would never account for 20 years of good writing. I would have turned into Charles Bukowski. He wrote 10,000 poems and 10 of them were great.
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I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a book culture. That's why I'm trying to make movies. Indians go to movies; Indians own video recorders.
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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.