Sherman Alexie

There have been players with Indian heritage, but there hasn't been a Native-American professional basketball player who became a regular for all sorts of social and political reasons.

Spiritual matters should be private.

The problem is that too many adults think their kids' lives are simple, or they try to make their lives simple, when their emotional lives are just as complicated as ours. They might have a few less tools to deal with it because they're young, but the emotions are all the same, and the subject matter is all the same.

I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators.

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.'

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.

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.

I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants.