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
thinking selfishness agendas
I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.
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.
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.
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.
responsibility moral problem
The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.
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.
book writing thinking
They've been screaming about the death of literacy for years, but I think TV is the Gutenberg [printing] press. I think TV is the only thing that keeps us vaguely in democracy even if it's in the hands of the corporate culture. If you're an artist you write in your time. Moaning about the fact that maybe people read more books a hundred years ago - that's not true. I think the same percentage has always read.
lying writing epic
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.
war might dubious
I'm not a pacifist by any measure, but I'm also fully aware that the reasons I might go to war could be very dubious.
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.
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.
baseball mother player
Like any good shaman, professional baseball player, or politician, my mother always answered questions with questions.
running oil world
It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.
what-if noses rowdy
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.