Quote

You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.

Louise Erdrich

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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Book
Flap
Need
Copy
Needs
Copies
Believe
Finished
Really
Failure
Approach
Writer
Start

More quotes by Louise Erdrich

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I want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko intelligence is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young.
Louise Erdrich
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Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
Louise Erdrich
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Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.
Louise Erdrich
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Cold sinks in, there to stay. And people, they'll leave you, sure. There's no return to what was and no way back. There's just emptiness all around, and you in it, like singing up from the bottom of a well, like nothing else, until you harm yourself, until you are a mad dog biting yourself for sympathy. Because there is no relenting.
Louise Erdrich
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Being a girl didn't really affect me until I entered junior high and had to wear skirts, curl my hair, and even get used to panty hose. However, my hatred of panty hose helped make me a writer who only wears comfortable clothes. I've successfully avoided panty hose for most of my life.
Louise Erdrich
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You never know where you're going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right off, just like you were connected by a small electrical wire that suddenly glows red hot and sparks.
Louise Erdrich
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If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.
Louise Erdrich
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We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.
Louise Erdrich
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A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.
Louise Erdrich
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They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were they all fused into a single stubbornness.
Louise Erdrich
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Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.
Louise Erdrich
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The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
Louise Erdrich
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I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names.
Louise Erdrich
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Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.
Louise Erdrich
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He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.
Louise Erdrich
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Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
Louise Erdrich
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Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.
Louise Erdrich
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It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
Louise Erdrich
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Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.
Louise Erdrich
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If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.
Louise Erdrich