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To write you had to read so I backed into reading.

Richard Ford

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Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Read
Write
Writing
Backed
Reading

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.
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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At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.
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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Some idiotic things are well worth doing.
Richard Ford
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Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
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 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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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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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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Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.
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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Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
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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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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I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
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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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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I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.
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