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Construed As Turf, Home Just Seems A Provisional Claim, A Designation You Make Upon A Place, Not One It Makes On You. A Certain Set Of Buildings, A Glimpsed, Smudged Window-view Across A Schoolyard, A Musty Aroma Sniffed Behind A Garage When You Were A Child, All Of Which Come Crowding In Upon Your Latter-day Senses -- Those Are Pungent Things And Vivid, Even Consoling. But To Me They Are Also Inert And Nostalgic And Unlikely To Connect You To The Real, To That Essence Art Can Sometimes Achieve, Which Is Permanence.

-Richard Ford

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Construed As Turf, Home

Richard Ford

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Construed As Turf, Home Just Seems A Provisional Claim, A Designation You Make Upon A Place, Not One It Makes On You. A Certain Set Of Buildings, A Glimpsed, Smudged Window-view Across A Schoolyard, A Musty Aroma Sniffed Behind A Garage When You Were A Child, All Of Which Come Crowding In Upon Your Latter-day Senses -- Those Are Pungent Things And Vivid, Even Consoling. But To Me They Are Also Inert And Nostalgic And Unlikely To Connect You To The Real, To That Essence Art Can Sometimes Achieve, Which Is Permanence.

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A Reader Is Entitled To Believe What He Or She Believes Is Consonant With The Facts Of The Book. It Is Not Unusual That Readers Take Away Something That Is Spiritually At Variance From What I Myself Experienced. That's Not To Say Readers Make Up The Book They Want. We All Have To Agree On The Facts. But Readers Bring Their Histories And All Sets Of Longings. A Book Will Pluck The Strings Of Those Longings Differently Among Different Readers.

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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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Some Idiotic Things Are Well Worth Doing.

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.

Cynicism Makes You Feel Smart, I Know It, Even When You Aren't Smart.

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.

Things You Did. Things You Never Did. Things You Dreamed. After A Long Time They Run Together.

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Even Though I Get A Lot Done With My Solitude, And I Make The Best Use Of It Possible, I Always Think Solitude Is An Interlude In A Period Of Time, Which Is Populated By Others.

The Art Of Living Your Life Has A Lot To Do With Getting Over Loss. The Less The Past Haunts You, The Better.

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The Past Is The Prism Through Which We See A Great, Great, Great Deal Of Ourselves; It's A Useful Prism. It Doesn't Mean That We're Fascinated By The Dead Or That We're Fascinated By Things That Are Settled. It Is Just One Place Where We Can Go To Understand Ourselves In The Present.

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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Until You Can Become Accountable To Yourself And Only Yourself, You're Probably Not Going To Live A Fully Vital Life. So Much Of Literature Is About Accountability. The Moral Issues In Most Novels Are About People Becoming Responsible For Their Own Behaviour. One Of The Forces Against Being Responsible For Your Own Behaviour Is The Force Of The Past, In The Way That The Past Tries To Form You.

It's Been My Habit Of Mind, Over These Years, To Understand That Every Situation In Which Human Beings Are Involved Can Be Turned On Its Head. Everything Someone Assures Me To Be True Might Not Be. Every Pillar Of Belief The World Rests On May Or May Not Be About To Explode. Most Things Don't Stay The Way They Are Very Long. Knowing This, However, Has Not Made Me Cynical. Cynical Means Believing That Good Isn't Possible; And I Know For A Fact That Good Is. I Simply Take Nothing For Granted And Try To Be Ready For The Change That's Soon To Come.

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