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

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" All art is exploitation. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" 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'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. "

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

" 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. "

" Don't live up to your stereotypes. "

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

" My father is an amazing man. "

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

" Writing is a lonely business. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" White Americans have a short memory. "

" 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. "