Sherman Alexie Quotes

People have certain ideas of what they think you should be, and I have fought that categorisation my whole life.

You're never going to get beyond other people's preconceptions of what you are and what you're about.

It's funny: people who meet me say, 'I thought you'd be different.' But I'm still the same guy.

For one thing I tend not to see myself in various moulds that people fit me into.

I guess I blow all the stereotypes right out of the water.

Nobody likes being told who or what they are.

In many ways, being yourself is dispelling stereotypes.

At first, I felt like I was put into this box because I played hockey. I thought that I was viewed a certain way, and I shouldn't wear certain clothes. Finally, I stepped aside and said, 'That's someone else's creation of me. I can be feminine and be strong.'

There's a difference between being yourself and being your stereotype.

I needed to stop being what everyone thought I was.

The one thing I will never do is become pigeonholed.

There are a lot of stereotypes to be broken which I think a lot of us are doing. What I do is, as soon as people try to pin me down to one kind of part, I'll play a very different kind of role, so it explodes that stereotype.

I understand people have preconceived notions of who I am or what I do. But I do find it a bit bizarre that people find it bizarre that I've grown up.

It delights me that I don't fit the stereotype of an actress.

It's lame to say that I'm a normal girl, but I think I am.

Never categorize yourself, society does that to you, don't do it to yourself.

I don't think of myself as Scottish or lesbian when I sit down and write. I am glad I have broken out of that limited audience.

I hate stereotypes and I hate cliche.

And one of the things that I learned was you can't generalise at all about a woman in a veil. You can't think you know her story, because she will confound you over and over again. She may be an engineer or a diplomat or a doctor. Or she may be an unbelievable babe with bleached hair down to her waist.

It can be frightening to turn your back on what others think is right. But I'm not the same as a lot of people - I'm quite artistic and quite eccentric sometimes. If you honour that, you fit into yourself better - and people accept you for what you are.

That's definitely something I've experienced my whole life - people thinking one thing and then discovering that I'm not, hopefully. So I relate to having to fight that and claim my own identity, when people are trying to throw different ones at me.

You don't want to spend your life explaining yourself.

I don't care what people call me, labels have the negative value of making smaller boundaries for people.

People look at me, they know I've appeared in costume dramas and they automatically assume I must be a Tory, I must be a certain type of person. Not a lot of people would think that I spent most of my early years totally rebelling against anything I could, getting suspended from school, going on demonstrations. I was a pretty difficult teenager.

I love to prove people wrong. They expect I'll sound a certain way when they see me, then they hear me and they can't believe it. I love that.