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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
Great
Finally
Something
Grew
Told
Feeling
Mississippi
Literature
Showed
Reading
Worthwhile
Feelings
Seriously
Place
Began

More quotes by 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.
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Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that
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Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
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Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.
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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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I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
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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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I had a Tourette's period. And obsessive compulsive disorder. Things would get in my brain that I couldn't get out of my brain.
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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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Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.
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The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm kind of a distractible guy.
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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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Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
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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.
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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.
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Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
Richard Ford