Sherman Alexie Quotes
-
When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.
-
In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly.
-
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.
-
If you care about something enough, it’s going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad. Arnold, get mad.
-
Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.
-
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.
-
Bush has not read enough books to have a developed moral sense. The fewer books you read, the easier it is to become fundamental. In some ways my antiwar stand here is also a stand on anti-literacy. Someone should get G.W. into a reading program, get him to join a book club. Have him read Hamlet, King Lear.
-
Indians have no monopoly on environmentalism. That's one of the great myths. But we were subsistence livers. They're two different things. Environmentalism is a conscious choice and subsistence is the absence of choice. We had to use everything to survive. And now that we've been assimilated and colonized and we have luxuries and excesses, we're just as wasteful as other people.
-
I used to sleep with my books in piles all over my bed and sometimes they were the only thing keeping me warm and always the only thing keeping me alive. Books are the best and worst defense.
-
I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture.
-
Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.
-
What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.
-
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 realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in the loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream.
-
I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.
-
Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
-
Pain is never added to pain. It multiplies.
-
In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.
-
The ordinary can be like medicine.
-
I end up feeling like a spy in the house of ethnicity, you know? Because people will talk around me as they would talk around the people in their cultural group. So I get to hear all the secrets and jokes and you know, I'm a part of every community because of the way I look.
-
Don't live up to your stereotypes.
-
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 recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.
-
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.