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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
Close
Intrigued
Beside
Opposite
Opposites
Exists
Behavior
Ordinary

More quotes by Richard Ford

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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.
Richard Ford
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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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Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
Richard Ford
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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?
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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.
Richard Ford
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At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.
Richard Ford
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Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
Richard Ford
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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.
Richard Ford
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I had a Tourette's period. And obsessive compulsive disorder. Things would get in my brain that I couldn't get out of my brain.
Richard Ford
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I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.
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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.
Richard Ford
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Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.
Richard Ford
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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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It's interesting to leave a place, interesting even to think about it. Leaving reminds us of what we can part with and what we can't, then offers us something new to look forward to, to dream about.
Richard Ford
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I wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.
Richard Ford
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The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being
Richard Ford
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I'm kind of a distractible guy.
Richard Ford
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I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
Richard Ford
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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.
Richard Ford
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Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
Richard Ford