Quotes from Sherman Alexie

All I owe the world is my art

And I know there has never been a human being or a television show, no matter how great, that could measure up to a great book.

Regarding love, marriage, and sex, both Shakespeare and Sitting Bull knew the only truth: treaties get broken.

The two funniest tribes I've ever been around are Indians and Jews, so I guess that says something about the inherent humor of genocide.

Nothing as white as the white girl an Indian boy loves.

Tragedies are fucked at the box office, the executive said. Sherwin didn't know if that was true. It didn't feel true. Or maybe it was truer than Sherwin wanted to believe. Weren't Americans afraid of tragedy?

yet, I have spent my literary career writing loving odes to my drunken and unreliable father. I have, in a spectacular show of hypocrisy, let my father off the hook for his lifetime of carelessness. That is completely unfair to my mother.

We are all given one thing by which our lives are measured, one determination. Mine are the stories which can change or not change the world. It doesn't matter which as long as I continue to tell the stories.

Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody rot read it, does it make a sound?

She was so white his reservation eyes suffered.

I've seen only painters and fishermen and I think they're both the same kind of men who made a different choice one time in their lives. The fisherman held a rod in his hand and said yes and the painter held a brush in his hand and said yes and sometimes I hold a beer in my hand and say yes.

Zsa Zsa was charismatic in the banal and voracious way that reality stars like Kim Kardashian are charismatic now.

The professor ignored Lynn's comments and proceeded with his lecture.

Sharon was Apache, and I was Spokane, but we practiced our tribal religions like we practiced Catholicism: We loved all of the ceremonies but thought they were pitiful cries to a disinterested god.

Today, a friend's 3 year old said to me, I know you almost every time I see you.

What's real? I ain't interested in what's real. I'm interested in how things should be.

Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?

taste failure in the tap water

That's how it was." "How do you kill somebody accidentally?"

Why don't you call somebody with the Coeur d'Alene tribe? A historian or somebody? Or be really crazy and ask one of our cousins what they know." "I can't," I said. "I'm too embarrassed to let them know how much I don't know." "They're sure gonna

Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace.

Grief is a plastic surgeon.

God, I wanted to be forgiven, but an apology offered to a dead man is only a selfish apology to yourself.

Homer had transformed a lying colonial asshole into one of the most admired literary figures in human history. So, Corliss asked, what lessons could we learn from Homer? To be considered epic, one needed only to employ an epic biographer.