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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

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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.
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I'm kind of a distractible guy.
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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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To write you had to read so I backed into reading.
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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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Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
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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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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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Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.
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Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
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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.
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Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.
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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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Paul Ryan, he is the real evil genius of the Republican party. He with his little hateful widow's peak and his smirky, snarly, simpering non-entity self, that's who I detest. Trump's just a moron, but Ryan is ugly and evil.
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Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
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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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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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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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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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I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.
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