Quote

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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Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Anything
Terrible
Manage
Wells
Teach
Plenty
Well
Face
Avoid
Must
Though
Regret
Much
Lying
Later
Searing
Life
Faces
Lies
Ruined
Truth
Possibility
Sooner
Also
Worth
Teaches

More quotes by 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
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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'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
Richard Ford
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I went to college to study hospitality. I quickly got out of that and realized that what I liked to do was write.
Richard Ford
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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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I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
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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If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.
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 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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Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that
Richard Ford
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I'm kind of a distractible guy.
Richard Ford
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At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.
Richard Ford
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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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I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.
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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The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
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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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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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