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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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Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Something
Grew
Told
Feeling
Mississippi
Literature
Showed
Reading
Worthwhile
Feelings
Seriously
Place
Began
Great
Finally

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.
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Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.
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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?
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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.
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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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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.
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If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
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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.
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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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Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
Richard Ford
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With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.
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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.
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To write you had to read so I backed into reading.
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I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.
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 went to college to study hospitality. I quickly got out of that and realized that what I liked to do was write.
Richard Ford