- [when asked if he thought that his portraying Indians as likely to have alcohol problems in his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian played into stereotypes about Indians] Stereotypes? It's not a stereotype. Stereotype implies that it's not real, and it's absolutely real. On my reservation, in my family, alcoholism was epidemic. When you're talking about aunts, uncles, cousins; there are three of us, currently, who don't drink actively, out of hundreds of people. So anybody who thinks it's a stereotype, alcoholism among Native Americans, is a romantic fool.
- [in his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian] Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze.
- I've spent very little time on my reservation in the last twenty years. Personally,there's too much pain.I actually think I'm more traditional as a writing nomad than people who never leave the reservation.
- When you're colonized, you end up exploiting your own spirituality. You're subject to so many negative stereotypes, you embrace the positive ones. Non-Indians love us in that way. They think we're all priests and healers. After generations of being reviled and dehumanized, to be thought of as magical is pretty seductive.
- Every reading I do, there's always some big Indian guy in the back row staring daggers at me. One guy in Montana said, 'You're a genius. You figured out what white people wanted, and you wrote it'. Yeah, that's exactly what I thought back in 1987. What's going to make me really economically successful? Poems about Indian guys. I'm a capitalistic genius.
- I don't believe in magic, but I do believe in interpreting coincidence exactly the way you want. I woke up after a tremendous bender, and the acceptance for my first book of poems was in the mailbox. For me, it was a call to get sober.
- When an Indian tribe gets a casino, they've officially declared that they've lost the war. It's the final submission.
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