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Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.

Richard Ford

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Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Maps
Across
Writer
Maybe
Firsts
First
Serial
Serials
Regional

More quotes by Richard Ford

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Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
Richard Ford
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To write you had to read so I backed into reading.
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?
Richard Ford
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At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.
Richard Ford
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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.
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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.
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.
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 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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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.
Richard Ford
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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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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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Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.
Richard Ford
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I want saner gun laws. I think all these automatic weapons should be banned, big clips and handguns should be banned. As far as I'm concerned, shotguns and hunting weapons are all that we should allow in America.
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'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
Richard Ford
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I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.
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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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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America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.
Richard Ford