Sherman Alexie Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Inspiring #People #Littles

“I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Radio #Poet #Turns

“Don't live up to your stereotypes.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Stereotype

“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.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Book #Writing #Thinking

“He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Love #Choices

“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.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Doctors #People #Different

“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

#Rivers #World #Helping

“I know a lot about being white - because I have to, I live in the white world. A white person doesn't live in the Indian world. I have to be white every day.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#White #World #Persons

“I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Book #Kissing #Intelligent

“The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Responsibility #Moral #Problem

“I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Writing #Blood #Remember

“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

#Selfish #Writing #Thinking

“It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Fear #Drinking #Rocks

“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.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Writing #Years #Two

“Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you hear the dreams putting on a good jacket that smells of fry bread and sweet smoke? Can you hear the dreams stay up late and talk so many stories?”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Dream #Sweet #Smell

“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

#Lying #Writing #Epic

“You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#People #Speak #Realizing

“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

#Writing #Bored #Effort

“The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#World #Filled #Smallest

“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.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Use #Comedy #Language

“When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Profound #Imagination #Violence

“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

#Beautiful #Character #White

“Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Perseverance #Giving #Lessons

“When are we left-wingers going to learn that we are losing the cultural and political battle with conservatives because we are fractured into narcissistic special-interest groups? Why should an antiwar protestor be so concerned about her dietary identity? The political opinions of vegetarians and meat-eaters are, after all, equally important. And what does it tell us about vegetarians that it would never occur to meat-eaters to carry a sign that reads "Pacifist Pork Chop Lover for Peace" or "Backyard Rib Barbecuer for International Nuclear Disarmament"?”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Political #Unity #Special

“I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, "That's a flower.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Children #Flower #Writing

“If you teach kids how to tell stories, they have a better chance at everything.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Kids #Stories #Chance

“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.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Two #Luxury #People

“I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don't write to protect them. It's far too late for that. I write to give them weapons-in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Teenager #Book #Writing

“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.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Shoes #Luxury #Worry

“At least half the country thinks the mascot issue is insignificant. But I think it's indicative of the ways in which Indians have no cultural power. We're still placed in the past. So we're either in the past or we're only viewed through casinos. I know a lot more about being white than you know about being Indian.”
-- Sherman Alexie

#Country #Thinking #Past