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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
Backed
Reading
Read
Write
Writing

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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I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
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'm kind of a distractible guy.
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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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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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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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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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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Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
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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Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.
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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Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
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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Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
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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The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
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 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