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I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.

Richard Ford

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Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Sense
Doesn
Stories
Heart
Something
Make
Someplace
Compelling
Theory

More quotes by Richard Ford

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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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Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.
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The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
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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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If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.
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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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Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
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At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.
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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 wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.
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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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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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To write you had to read so I backed into reading.
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I'm kind of a distractible guy.
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Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that
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Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
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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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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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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