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All art is exploitation.

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.
Exploitation
Art

More quotes by Sherman Alexie

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I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays.
Sherman Alexie
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Don't live up to your stereotypes.
Sherman Alexie
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And I couldn't make fun of her for that dream. It was my dream, too. And Indian boys weren't supposed to dream like that. And white girls from small towns weren't supposed to dream big, either. We were supposed to be happy with our limitations. But there was no way Penelope and I were going to sit still. Nope, we both wanted to fly.
Sherman Alexie
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All I owe the world is my art.
Sherman Alexie
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Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is.
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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Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.
Sherman Alexie
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There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)
Sherman Alexie
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The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific, you know, it's the worst sort of précis of who we are.
Sherman Alexie
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Ialways think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians. So I'm never quite sure why we eat Turkey like everybody else. (101)
Sherman Alexie
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I guess a witness is all I am. I think as a writer, you're pretty removed. Writing is a very selfish, individualistic pursuit. So in that sense I'm a witness because I'm not participating.
Sherman Alexie
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Nobody recognizes that a bookstore or library can also be a drowning polar bear. And in this country [US], magazines, newspapers, and bookstores are drowning polar bears. And if people can't see that or don't want to talk about it, I don't understand them at all.
Sherman Alexie
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Yep, my daddy was an undependable drunk. But he'd never missed any of my organized games, concerts, plays, or picnics. He may not have loved me perfectly, but he loved me as well as he could. (189)
Sherman Alexie
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It's a weird thing. Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear. But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten the reservations were meant to be death camps.
Sherman Alexie
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If you teach kids how to tell stories, they have a better chance at everything.
Sherman Alexie
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Bush has not read enough books to have a developed moral sense. The fewer books you read, the easier it is to become fundamental. In some ways my antiwar stand here is also a stand on anti-literacy. Someone should get G.W. into a reading program, get him to join a book club. Have him read Hamlet, King Lear.
Sherman Alexie
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I don't have to participate in another culture's ceremonies in order to respect that culture.
Sherman Alexie
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I suddenly understood that if every moment of a book should be taken seriously, then every moment of a life should be taken seriously as well.
Sherman Alexie
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If you're good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can't be wrong.
Sherman Alexie
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Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito.
Sherman Alexie