Quote

For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples' worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better.

Richard Ford

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Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Thinking
Thought
Divorce
Seems
Began
Derision
Better
Private
Worries
Everything
Source
Profoundly
Feel
Seem
Amusement
Feels
Worry
Ironic
Make
Found
Sources
Time
Night
Peoples

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I think that's the thing that memoir can do more than anything it does it testifies and bears witness to the existence of people whose lives, pleasures and virtues would never have been testified to without my having done it. That makes me really glad.
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I want saner gun laws. I think all these automatic weapons should be banned, big clips and handguns should be banned. As far as I'm concerned, shotguns and hunting weapons are all that we should allow in America.
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Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.
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The way in which sports focuses more on the peccadilloes, lives and putative personalities of athletes and less on the finer points of playing games, I've become less interested in it. I don't want to write sports profiles.
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If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
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Theres a lot to be said for doing what youre not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what youre supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.
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Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things.
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Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.
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I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.
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Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.
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If sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.
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The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.
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Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
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America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.
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I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
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I grew up in Mississippi being told it was a great place, but not feeling that. When I finally began reading seriously, literature showed me something about where I was from which was worthwhile.
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Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.
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The thing about being a writer is that you never have to ask, 'Am I doing something that's worthwhile?' Because even if you fail at it, you know that it's worth doing.
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Most things don't stay the way they are for very long. I take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.
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In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.
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