Sherman Alexie Quotes
-
Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.
-
If a parent doesn't want his/her child to read a book then there is always an alternative text to read. But the book banners want to control what every child reads.
-
My father was a basketball player, so I loved basketball because he did. It was a direct transference. But, more than that, basketball, in the United States at least, plays the same function that soccer does everyone else in the world. It's the sport of poverty. It's the sport born of poverty. It's the cheapest sport.
-
I'll quit eating meat when you get a cow out here to beat me at a poetry slam. Only so many words rhyme with 'Mooo.' I mean, yes, we're supposed to be better stewards; yes, we're supposed to take care of the earth; yes, we're supposed to honor the sacrifices made by the animals; yes yes yes yes yes, but dammit, we're in charge, and you know why? It's because of these [holding out thumbs]...Maybe you think that carrots are less important than cows. I think they're equal, especially in a sauce.
-
All I owe the world is my art.
-
The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.
-
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.
-
Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.
-
I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.
-
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.
-
I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.
-
Funny how a little politeness can change people's minds.
-
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.
-
My father is an amazing man.
-
He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.
-
That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice. I'm traveling heavy with illusions.
-
Also because I'm ambiguously ethnic looking, you know, I come to New York and I can be anything. People generally think I'm half of whatever they are.
-
I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.
-
If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.
-
Estranged from the tribe that gives no protection, What happens to the soul that hates its reflection?
-
There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away.
-
I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.
-
In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.
-
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.