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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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Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Life
Extra
Extras
Beat
Beats
Started
Literature
Reading
Felt

More quotes by Richard Ford

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If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.
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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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Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
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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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The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
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Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
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I'm kind of a distractible guy.
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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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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.
Richard Ford
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Americans don't have saner gun laws because most Americans, including those citizens who puzzle over better angels, don't want saner gun laws.
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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.
Richard Ford
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Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that
Richard Ford
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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.
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.
Richard Ford
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Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
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I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
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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.
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
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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.
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