"Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married."
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Richard Ford quotes (page 2 of 6)
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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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"Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known."
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"What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly."
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"I didn't read a serious book until I was 19."
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"When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again--which is a loss. But to shield yourself--as I didn't do--seems to be an even greater error, since what's lost is the truth of your parents' life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in."
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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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"With imagination, you can put something where nothing was."
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"We're all hoping that Trump doesn't get our world on his terms because there won't be anything of it left. Trump is a true psychopath, a psychopath in the way that tragedy becomes tragedy."
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"Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle."
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"I'm dyslexic. If you can reconcile yourself to not being able to burn through books, which you shouldn't any way, you can slow the whole process down. Then, because of my disability, there is more for me in imaginative literature than there is for other people."
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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."
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"I'm kind of a distractible guy."
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"Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together."
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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 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'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite."
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"I'm an equal opportunity reader - although I don't much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty."
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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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