Sherman Alexie Quotes

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Sherman Alexie

Profession : Writer

Birth : October 7, 1966

I don't have to participate in another culture's ceremonies in order to respect that culture.

Sherman Alexie

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

Sherman Alexie

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.

Sherman Alexie

Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion.

Sherman Alexie

All I owe the world is my art.

Sherman Alexie

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.

Sherman Alexie

I was a controversial figure on my reservation when I was a kid. I was mouthy and opinionated and arrogant. Nothing has changed.

Sherman Alexie

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

Sherman Alexie

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

Sherman Alexie

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.

Sherman Alexie

In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.

Sherman Alexie

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.

Sherman Alexie

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

Sherman Alexie

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.

Sherman Alexie

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.

Sherman Alexie

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.

Sherman Alexie

Spiritual matters should be private.

Sherman Alexie

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

Sherman Alexie

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

Sherman Alexie

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

Sherman Alexie