Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie
Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr., born October 7, 1966) is an American poet, writer, and filmmaker. Much of his writing draws on his experiences as a Native American with ancestry from several tribes. He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and now lives in Seattle, Washington...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 October 1966
CityWelpinet, WA
CountryUnited States of America
Sherman Alexie quotes about
two definitions partners
and then she asks me how many sexual partners I've had and I say one or two depending on your definition of what I did to Custer . . .
perseverance giving lessons
Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
summer nature car
Summer coming like a car from down the highway.
beautiful character white
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.
shoes luxury worry
Environmentalism is a luxury. Just like being a vegetarian is a luxury. When you have to worry about eating - you're not going to be worried about where the food's coming from, or who made your shoes. Poverty, whether planned or not planned, is a way of making environmentalism moot.
doctors people different
If I were a doctor nobody would be inviting me to talk to reservations. I'd be a different person. Writers can influence more people.
two luxury people
Indians have no monopoly on environmentalism. That's one of the great myths. But we were subsistence livers. They're two different things. Environmentalism is a conscious choice and subsistence is the absence of choice. We had to use everything to survive. And now that we've been assimilated and colonized and we have luxuries and excesses, we're just as wasteful as other people.
community feelings feeling-lost
A lot of native culture has been destroyed. So you already feel lost inside your culture. And then you add up feeling lost and insignificant inside the larger culture. So you end up feeling lost squared. And to never be recognized, to never have any power, you know, other minority communities actually have a lot of economic, cultural power.
use comedy language
A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.
folks international knows
Because I'm an American, I know there's all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me.
writing years two
I write less about alcohol, less and less and less. You 're an addict - so of course you write about the thing you love most. I loved alcohol the most, loved it more than anybody or anything. That's what I wrote about. And it certainly accounted for some great writing. But it accounted for two or three years of good writing - it would never account for 20 years of good writing. I would have turned into Charles Bukowski. He wrote 10,000 poems and 10 of them were great.
responsibility moral problem
The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.
people poor poor-people
I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.
teacher book mean
Every Indian kid has access to MySpace and Facebook. But that doesn't mean they have access to books and great teachers. This idea about bringing digital tech into schools is great, but once again I'll say that this is not how people actually learn.