Sherman Alexie Quotes
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Don't live up to your stereotypes.
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That's one more thing people don't know about Indians: We love to talk dirty.
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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.
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He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.
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Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.
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Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.
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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.
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Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.
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All I owe the world is my art.
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If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.
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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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If you teach kids how to tell stories, they have a better chance at everything.
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In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.
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I know a lot about being white - because I have to, I live in the white world. A white person doesn't live in the Indian world. I have to be white every day.
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All art is exploitation.
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...it's like this white-Indian thing has gotten out of control. And the thing with the blacks and the Mexicans. Everybody blaming everybody...I don't know what happened. I can't explain it all. Just look around at the world. Look at this country. Things just aren't like they used to be.' 'Son, things have never been like what you think they used to be.
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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.
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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.
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I've learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children
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My parents banned nothing, though the Christian fundamentalists in my tribe held book-and-record burnings every now and again. So, yes, fundamentalist assholes can also be brown-skinned.
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My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room.
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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.
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Non-Indian writers usually say "Great Spirit," "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four-Legged, and Winged." Mixed-blood writers usually say "Creator, "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four- Legged, and Winged." Indian writers usually say "God," "Mother Earth," "Human Being, Dog, and Bird."
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Is revenge a circle inside of a circle inside of a circle?