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

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" My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures. "

" Don't live up to your stereotypes. "

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

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

" You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it. "

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

" Spiritual matters should be private. "

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

" I look more Indian when I'm serious. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My father is an amazing man. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment. "

" A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature. "

" We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization. "

" I think that white women are more apt to read laterally. So I think there's some strong identification for women, and their political and social positions, and minorities. I think that the political power of, let's say, the average Indian man and a white woman are pretty equal. "

" If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time. "

" 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. "

" All I owe the world is my art. "

" The dream he needed most was the dream that frightened him more. "