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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.

Richard Ford

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Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Important
Taking
Contradicting
Needs
Forever
Sentences
Things
Two
Generally
People
Anything
Miss
Back
Missing
Humans
Beginning
Need
Spend
Gist
Right
Cutting
Qualifying

More quotes by Richard Ford

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The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
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Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.
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I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.
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I don't want to be taken to Bhutan and smell the flowers. I want to be told something I couldn't have been told any other way.
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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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The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being
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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.
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Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that
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Some idiotic things are well worth doing.
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If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
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Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.
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Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.
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I went to college to study hospitality. I quickly got out of that and realized that what I liked to do was write.
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At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars.
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Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can't, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That's why I don't review books.
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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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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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Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
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And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.
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With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.
Richard Ford