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.

I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture.

And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy...

If it’s fiction, then it better be true.

Imagination is the politics of dreams; imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket. . . . Imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed; save us from hitchhiking...

But the real interesting stuff is in the cellar and the attic.

Well,” she said, “how can I be sure there aren’t invisible people in the world? Scientists didn’t believe in the mountain gorilla for hundreds of years. And now look. So if scientists can be wrong,...

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...

He sang ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in four different languages but never knew where that staircase stood.

When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.

son,” Mr. P said. “You’re going to find more and more hope the farther and farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation.

I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,’ I said. ‘By Black and White. By Indian and White. But I know this isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes:...

Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn’t see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That’s what mothers told...

Certainly I’m angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don’t think it’s a helpless emotion.

I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.

I learned how to stop crying.I learned how to hide inside of myself.I learned how to be somebody else.I learned how to be cold and numb.

Poetry = Anger x Imagination