Sherman Alexie Quotes

In India people can't stomach this attitude of mine, and when I say, 'Hurry up, let's get to the point,' they feel hurt.

Friends at school were always quite shocked that we holidayed in Nigeria, but it was all pretty middle-class, really.

Girls don't poop, so don't claim you do. You can fart - because farting is funny - but we don't want to know that you poop.

One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.

Cinema is about people, and we are a very emotional people. That is why you see those ups and those downs and those colours. That is what Indian cinema is about.

Being German, I think we don't really express a lot of things.

Of course, in India, I always said, 'Oh yes, I'm married.'

You can get pictures into what people are sort of thinking about others. Just go onto Google and type 'Why are Indians' and then look for the autocomplete.

I think I've become the brand ambassador of arranged marriages, especially for working Indian women.

White America don't get to dictate how me and Shaq talk to each other.

For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it.

There's a cultural difference between India and the rest of the world.

A lot of the things that involve power on the highest levels sometimes involve the darker side of human psychology. People can be very passive aggressive or they can be aggressive and they can conceal their intentions. There's this world that exists that nobody writes about or describes it's like a dirty little secret or taboo.

I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology [course in college], it is not just the great works of [hu]mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

I'll tell you what I like about Chinese people: they're hanging in there with the chop sticks, aren't they? You know they've seen the fork. They're staying with the sticks.

The phrase 'I just turn on my monkey and it makes me feel good' sounds very dirty, but I can't explain why. It's great to try to use expressions like that on the comics page. People want to complain but they can't, because they can't figure out quite what they should be complaining about.

Everyone can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who don't are the wrong ones.

How is it possible that in just the last ten years all of these things which were taboo throughout our culture, throughout the culture, things that were taboo are now not only normal but celebrated, and people who were not really supportive of them are called kooks and the new weirdos?

I make people laugh hard; I'm a comic, that's just the way it is. And I make them laugh because I'm funny, not because I'm filthy. The subject matter is dirty, but the pictures I paint are really funny. A lot of comics don't understand that that's what it's about. It's just, "I'll be dirty and they'll laugh." Nobody's becoming a superstar that way.

I'm saying what a lot of people would want to say but are too embarrassed.

The polite of every country seem to have but one character. A gentleman of Sweden differs but little, except in trifles, from one of any other country. It is among the vulgar we are to find those distinctions which characterize a people.

I used to get upset with the word Bollywood, and what it means in the West. The stereotype of us being dancing, singing, puppet showgirls. Indians are nearly one fifth of the world's population; we have one of the most prolific film industries in the world. When people used to ask me about it, or replicate what they think is Bollywood dancing, thinking that they're being funny, I used to get offended. But now I show them the stuff we do.

Indian leaders are saying, "You don't understand our caste system. It's really a lovely thing. People are very happy about it and so on." I don't think that's quite fair.

I took movement classes that I wore my double-breasted suits to. I worked on my elocution because people spoke differently then. I was really trying to toe the line. I think that if I had spoken exactly the way that people spoke back then, it probably would have alienated people.

Young people want to look like peas in a pod, and there is no use trying to make them different.