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I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

Richard Ford

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Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Opposite
Opposites
Exists
Behavior
Ordinary
Close
Intrigued
Beside

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Some idiotic things are well worth doing.
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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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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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At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.
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The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
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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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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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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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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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Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
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Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home - when your personal clouds don't move but hang - can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.
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Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
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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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Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.
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Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that.
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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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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'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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For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?
Richard Ford