Writing is a lonely business.
I don't have to participate in another culture's ceremonies in order to respect that culture.
In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.
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 my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.
Don't live up to your stereotypes.
All I owe the world is my art.
I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.
Spiritual matters should be private.
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 thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.
We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.
I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture.