“Indianapolis, Indiana is the first place in the United States of America where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian. The kind of people who'll hang a white man for murdering an Indian--that's the kind of people for me.”

“the people of the united states were...spoiled children, who are begging for a frightening but just daddy to tell them exactly what to do”

“The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm”

“Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. [...] Big, undreamed-of things--the people on the edge see them first.”

“What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?”

“Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”

“Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.”