quotes: Louise Erdrich

from a much-admired author:

"It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That’s how one has to write anyway—in secret."

"When it comes to God, I cherish doubt."

"When I can’t end a story, I usually find that I’ve actually written past the ending. The trick of course is to go back and decide where the last line hits."

"By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive... People sometimes ask me, Did you really have these experiences? I laugh, Are you crazy? I’d be dead. I’d be dead fifty times. I don’t write directly from my own experience so much as an emotional understanding of it."

[on her business, Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis]  "People need bookstores and need other readers. We need the intimate communication with others who love books. We don’t really think we do, because of the ease that the Internet has introduced, but we still need the physical world more than we know. Little bookstores are community services, not profitable business enterprises. Books are just too inexpensive online and there are too many of them, so a physical bookstore has to offer something different. Perhaps little bookstores will attain nonprofit status. Maybe one fine day the government will subsidize them, so they can thrive as nonprofit entities. Some very clever bookstore, probably not us, is going to manage to do that and become the paradigm for the rest."

(Louise Erdrich, interviewed in Paris Review, "The Art of Fiction #208, winter 2010)