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

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" But the real interesting stuff is in the cellar and the attic. "

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

" Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming. "

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

" 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. "

" My father is an amazing man. "

" 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. "

" Spiritual matters should be private. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" All art is exploitation. "

" 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. "

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

" Don't live up to your stereotypes. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian. "

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

" All I owe the world is my art. "