There's a lot to be said for doing what you're not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what you're supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.
From Richard Ford
My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.
I don't hate children. My wife and I just didn't think we would be good parents, and also by the time we got married in 1968, we were pretty nose-down toward what we wanted to do, and having a child was going to be an excuse to fail.
Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.
America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.
Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.
The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
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.
I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that's just how it is.
I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives