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

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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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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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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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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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If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
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The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
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To write you had to read so I backed into reading.
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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.
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If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.
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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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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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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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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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Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
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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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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.
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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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Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.
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Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
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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