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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.

Richard Ford

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Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Getting
Less
Living
Art
Past
Better
Life
Haunts
Loss

More quotes by Richard Ford

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Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.
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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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.
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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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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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For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples' worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better.
Richard Ford
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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.
Richard Ford
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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 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 started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
Richard Ford
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I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.
Richard Ford
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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.
Richard Ford
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Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.
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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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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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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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.
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.
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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Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
Richard Ford