Sherman Alexie Quotes

I have my opinions about the way my father was. But they are my opinions, not necessarily the truth, and they are certainly not the whole spectrum of what this man was going through. It's my young, selfish interpretation of that person.

When someone starts talking to me about the truth, what I hear is what they're telling me about themselves.

Opinion is something wherein I go about to give reasons why all the world should think as I think.

No matter what it is, I think people want the answer they want, they don't want the truth.

Self-evident, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else.

I think everyone spins. You would just be an empty vacant shell reporting facts. I mean, you have your life that you bring with you to every moment that happens.

There is no such thing as an objective interpretation.

All of my movies are about how I wish the world would work. I've made very few movies about how the world worked. I could name them on one and a half hands, about how my movies have been very reflective of how the world was exactly. A lot of my movies are really about the way I wish the world was, and that's what this whole art form is all about. It's an interpretive art form.

Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or as we are conditioned to see it.

But I think I’m coloured by my own wishes, & experimental mood.

We make the assumption that everyone sees life the way we do

Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, author (1867-1957)

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

While there is such a thing as correctness in ethics, in interpretation, in mathematics, the way to understand that is not by trying to model it on the ways in which we get things right in physics.

Your positions on EVERYTHING are based on the story you tell yourself and not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

You think that you can judge what's good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don't mind my saying so.

Distrust your judgment the moment you can discern the shadow of a personal motive in it.

I never aspire to be objective because I don't believe in objectivity. It's important to be truthful, and it's important to make sure that the audience has a solid sense of what the expectation should be of a particular film.

The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be

Good and evil - I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil.

A fact is not a truth until you love it.

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

What probably distorts everything in life is that one is convinced that one is speaking the truth because one says what one thinks.

God save us from idealists! They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won't they commit to get it! I swear, Mirella, I'll settle for a world with good manners.

You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.