Louise Erdrich Quotes

What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.

I try to avoid describing one interpretation of my books. Of course I have an opinion. I have things I want to say, but I don't ever want to limit anybody, to have them say, 'Oh, he said this, so that's what it's about.' I'm happy people bring their own stuff to it.

What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts.

'First Light' has gotten a reputation as a kind of cult classic about science. I never really intended it to be read as a science book, but books, like children, have a way of choosing their own friends.

Biological science is a tool, and like all tools, it can be used for good or bad. It’s like a knife blade with three edges: The edge that cuts, the dull edge that does not cut well and the edge that cuts what you do not want it to.

I don't necessarily set out to teach or say anything in particular in my writing. Morals and themes come out as I'm telling the tale.

I don't think it's the writer's job to give answers or to give opinions. In fact, when a writer has answers, I think the work ends up being corrupted. It becomes didactic. What a book does is share a consciousness and invite people to explore the questions as best as you can.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author."

I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.

I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

Had pretended to be Abbadon of the Dark, when always he had been working for the Light.

Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the "purpose" be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.

Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story.

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

No woman or man is any one thing and the men in my stories, well, some of them are good and some of them are terrible, and most of them make the lives of the women they love much harder than need be. Why? Because that's the kind of storytelling I was drawn to when I wrote these stories, most of which are at least seven years or more old.

Maybe we could learn a little lesson, maybe this all shine a little light, cause there's no healthy way to mess with the line between wrong and right.

Being confronted with the realization that work you intended to benefit people is being used against them has a radicalizing effect.

What is forgotten, however, is that many times the Good we create leads to Evil that will destroy us.

Men frequently do good only to give themselves opportunity of doing ill with impunity.

There is no obligation for the author of a film to believe in, or to sympathise with, the moral behaviour of his characters. Nor is he necessarily to be accredited with the same opinions as his characters. Nor is it necessary or obligatory for him to believe in the tenet of his construction - all of which is a disclaimer to the notion that the author of Drowning by Numbers believes that all men are weak, enfeebled, loutish, boorish and generally inadequate and incompetent as partners for women. But it's a thought.

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.

People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.