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We can all learn from every text. Reading the work that disgusts you can only strengthen your core beliefs. I could teach a semester-long course based only on reading the local telephone book. All stories can be taught in valuable ways.

Sherman Alexie

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Sherman Alexie
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: October 7
Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Wellpinit
Washington
Sherman Joseph Alexie
Jr.
Every
Course
Disgusting
Long
Teach
Local
Belief
Beliefs
Reading
Core
Disgusts
Learn
Valuable
Semester
Stories
Based
Telephone
Book
Taught
Strengthen
Work
Ways
Text

More quotes by 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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The world is divided by two different tribes. The people who are assholes and the people who are not.
Sherman Alexie
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Is revenge a circle inside of a circle inside of a circle?
Sherman Alexie
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When you construct a mix tape, the first song you come out with has to be a barnburner.
Sherman Alexie
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Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.
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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When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.
Sherman Alexie
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He made me realize that hard work--that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task--is joyous
Sherman Alexie
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A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.
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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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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Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.
Sherman Alexie
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Only in rock music and the literary world you see so many ugly white guys with beautiful women. That says a lot about the women, their character. They're attracted to more than surface.
Sherman Alexie
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I used to think the world was broken down by tribes, I said. By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.
Sherman Alexie
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All I owe the world is my art.
Sherman Alexie
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It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.
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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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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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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My father was a basketball player, so I loved basketball because he did. It was a direct transference. But, more than that, basketball, in the United States at least, plays the same function that soccer does everyone else in the world. It's the sport of poverty. It's the sport born of poverty. It's the cheapest sport.
Sherman Alexie