Lies have short shelf lives. Lies go bad. Lies rot and stink up the joint.

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

And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God.

Then she tells me that Jesus isstill herebecause Jesus wasonce here.And parts of Jesus arestill floating in the air.She tells me Jesus’ DNA ispart of the collective DNA.She tells we are all partof Jesus, we...

All I owe the world is my art.

White Americans have a short memory.

Mick had once come across one of Wilson’t books and was surprised to see his face on the back cover. Mick was even more surprised when he read the book. It was pretty good, although...

Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don’t want to play.

Sure, we thought the acresThat we tilled were sacred,But how could we have knownThat wheat can haunt like ghosts

The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a – you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.

I’d marry youTomorrow.” I think I’m engagedTo thirty-six women, my harem:Platonic, bookish, and enraged.I love them! But it would scare them-No, of course, they already knowThat I can be just one more boy,A toy warrior...

Seems like the cold would never go away and winter would be like the bottom of my feet but then it is gone in one night and in its place comes the sun so large...

We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.

You’d never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

The streetlight outside my house shines on tonight and I’m watching it like it could give me a vision. James ain’t talked ever and he looks at that streetlight like it was a word and...

You read a book for the story, for each of its words,” Gordy said, “and you draw your cartoons for the story, for each of the words and images. And, yeah, you need to take...

That’s how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be...

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

I don’t think there’s a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don’t think of it as being class literature.

Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read?…’How many books never get checked...

You meet me after school right here”, I said.”Why?” he asked.I couldn’t believe he was so stupid.”Because we’re going to finish this fight.””You’re crazy,” Roger said.He got to his feet and walked away. His gang...

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...

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.

I was emotionally erect.

There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)

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...

All art is exploitation.

So I guess you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University but not quite good enough for St. Mary’s College of the Blessed Womb...

Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works.

I knew I was being an idiot. But I figured if I kept being an idiot, if I didn’t actually accept the truth, then the truth would become false.

I think that white women are more apt to read laterally. So I think there’s some strong identification for women, and their political and social positions, and minorities. I think that the political power of,...

I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn’t want to be another disappointing Indian.

Shit,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re feeling sorry for yourself because you ain’t had to fight a war. You’re lucky. Shit, all you had was that damn Desert Storm. Should have called it...

I got in a fight with my girlfriend,” I said. “I was just driving around, blowing off steam, you know?”Well, you should be more careful where you drive,” the officer said. “You’re making people nervous....

A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.

Pain is never added to pain. It multiplies.

My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we’d lie in the same bed, and I’d read...

I don’t have to participate in another culture’s ceremonies in order to respect that culture.

More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.

As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes,...

He felt split in two, one crazy man eating hair and one rational man watching a crazy man eat hair. He chewed and swallowed the last pieces of his father’s life. He felt like he...

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...

My father is an amazing man.

And I couldn’t make fun of her for that dream. It was my dream, too. And Indian boys weren’t supposed to dream like that. And white girls from small towns weren’t supposed to dream big,...

I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don’t share their shit. They’re like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw....

I’m a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.

If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.

What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.

I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.