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Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.

Sherman Alexie

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Sherman Alexie
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: October 7
Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Wellpinit
Washington
Sherman Joseph Alexie
Jr.
Listen
Read
Times
Three
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More quotes by Sherman Alexie

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I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.
Sherman Alexie
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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.
Sherman Alexie
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Sometimes it's called passing out and sometimes it's just pretending to be asleep
Sherman Alexie
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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.
Sherman Alexie
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I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.
Sherman Alexie
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What if someone picks on me? I asked Then I'll pick on them. What if someone picks my nose? I asked. The I'll pick your nose, too Rowdy said.
Sherman Alexie
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I ain't interested in the truth. I'm interested in the way things should be.
Sherman Alexie
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The percentage of Indian kids doing some sort of artistic work is much higher than in the general population - painting, drawing, dancing, singing. The creation of art is still an everyday part of Indian culture, unlike the dominant culture, where art is sort of peripheral.
Sherman Alexie
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Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.
Sherman Alexie
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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.
Sherman Alexie
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In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your epicness. But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.
Sherman Alexie
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Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.
Sherman Alexie
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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.'
Sherman Alexie
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If a parent doesn't want his/her child to read a book then there is always an alternative text to read. But the book banners want to control what every child reads.
Sherman Alexie
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All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.
Sherman Alexie
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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.
Sherman Alexie
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At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future.
Sherman Alexie
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Religious fundamentalists are unaware that freedom of religion necessarily brings with it the freedom to mock religion.
Sherman Alexie
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I end up feeling like a spy in the house of ethnicity, you know? Because people will talk around me as they would talk around the people in their cultural group. So I get to hear all the secrets and jokes and you know, I'm a part of every community because of the way I look.
Sherman Alexie
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But we danced, under wigs and between unfinished walls, through broken promises and around empty cupboards.
Sherman Alexie