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

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

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

" Writing is a lonely business. "

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

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

" Don't live up to your stereotypes. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Spiritual matters should be private. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" I don't know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders. "

" 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. "

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

" My father is an amazing man. "

" 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. "