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

More quotes by Richard Ford

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I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
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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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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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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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I wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.
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Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.
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Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
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At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.
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Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that
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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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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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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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The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being
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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 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.
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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.
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And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.
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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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Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
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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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