Sherman Alexie's Quotes

I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.

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

I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants.

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

My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror.

My father is an amazing man.

My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room.

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

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.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

Spiritual matters should be private.

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.

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.

Well, I think the worst part about tribalism is its tendency to fundamentalize, and if I can fight fundamentalism in any of its forms I'm happy.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

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

White Americans have a short memory.

Writing is a lonely business.

You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

In high school I dated a white woman. She would come to visit me on the rez. And her dad, who was very racist, didn't like that at all. And he told her one time, 'You shouldn't go on the rez if you're white because Indians have a lot of anger in their heart.'

My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.

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.

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.

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 felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.