"It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?"
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Quote collection
Richard Ford quotes (page 5 of 6)
105 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read."
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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."
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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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"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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"Someone wanted me to write a profile for ESPN about the commissioner of baseball, and I said, "He's just some suit! Some Republican. No!" I mean if you want me to write about baseball, boxing or football, I'll write about those things because I watch them, I think about them a lot and I like them. But I don't want to write about Barry Bonds."
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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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"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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"What I know is, you have chance in life--of surviving it--if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find."
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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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"I realized I loved you, and I didn't want to be married to somebody I didn't love. I wanted to be married to you. It isn't all that complicated."
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"At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument."
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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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"Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map."
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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 started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life."
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"My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to."
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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'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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