359 Quotes by Louise Erdrich

My parents' marriage is a gift to everyone around them - 60 years of making their kids laugh. How many parents are actually funny?

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it.

I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn't leave until I was 18, and I've kept going back.

I write first drafts by hand. Never do I open an umbrella inside the house. I don't predict wins or losses. I used to stand on a certain piece of rug if my brothers and husband were watching football and their team got in trouble - but now the luck went out of that rug. If a circle is involved, I try to go clockwise.

Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.

I live on the margin of just about everything. I'm a marginal person, and I think that is where I've become comfortable. I'm marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I'm always German, too, you know, and I'm always a mother. That's my first identity, but I'm always a writer, too.

I have to write. I have to be an artist.