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

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" 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. "

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

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

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

" I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it. "

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

" When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author. "

" All art is exploitation. "

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

" 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. "

" Writing is a lonely business. "

" 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 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. "

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

" Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" White Americans have a short memory. "

" I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture. "

" Spiritual matters should be private. "

" 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.' "

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

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