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You're Only Good If You Can Do Bad And Decide Not To.

-Richard Ford

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You're Only Good If

Richard Ford

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You're Only Good If You Can Do Bad And Decide Not To.

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I Didn't Read A Serious Book Until I Was 19.

There Are More People In America That Love Guns And Want Guns For Themselves And Everyone Else Than There Are Not. It Is Also True That Liberals Who Don't Want Guns Are Puny By And Large. They're Not Risking Anything, All They're Doing Is Saying They Don't Like Something. Liberals Are Quick To Say This Should Happen And This Should Not Happen, But They Don't Do Anything About It Much.

Maybe I'm A Serial Regional Writer. First Here, Then There, Across The Map.

Americans Don't Have Saner Gun Laws Because Most Americans, Including Those Citizens Who Puzzle Over Better Angels, Don't Want Saner Gun Laws.

Theres A Lot To Be Said For Doing What Youre Not Supposed To Do, And The Rewards Of Doing What Youre 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.

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.

You're Only Good If You Can Do Bad And Decide Not To.

With Imagination, You Can Put Something Where Nothing Was.

The Pace Of Life Feels Morally Dangerous To Me.

If You Lose All Hope, You Can Always Find It Again.

To Write You Had To Read So I Backed Into Reading.

Marry Somebody You Love And Who Thinks You Being A Writer's A Good Idea.

Reading Is Probably What Leads Most Writers To Writing.

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.

The National Rifle Association Is A Domestic Terrorist Organization That Tacitly Supports The Killing Of Children More Than It Supports Reasoned Gun Legislation.

I'm Not One Of Those People Who As A Writer Lets My Characters Tell Me What They Want To Do Or Call To Me Or Seek Me. I Go Seeking For Things, Using Them As An Agent, Really.

I Know You Can Dream Your Way Through An Otherwise Fine Life, And Never Wake Up, Which Is What I Almost Did.

Fear And Hope Are Alike Underneath.

I'm Intrigued By How Ordinary Behavior Exists So Close Beside Its Opposite.

I've Been Mainly A Happy Boy In My Life. I Married The Right Girl And We Did What We Wanted To Do.

I'm Kind Of A Distractible Guy.

Find What Causes A Commotion In Your Heart. Find A Way To Write About That

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.

At Heart, Of Course, A Story Itself Is Consolation's Instrument.

My Father Died In My Arms. That's Tumult. That's Everything Exploding.

Tweet, Tweet, You're Alive, You Ignorant Asshole.

When People Realize They Are Being Listened To, They Tell You Things.

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.

When I Write A Novel I Start Each Morning By Reading For 20 Minutes.

Our Ex-wifes Always Harbour Secrets About Us That Make Them Irresistable. Until, Of Course, We Remember Who We Are And What We Did And Why We Are Not Married Anymore.

I Think Once You Love Somebody, You Love Somebody; That's Just How It Is.

Your Life Doesn't Mean What You Have Or What You Get. Its What Your'e Willing To Give Up.

Happiness For Me Is Getting To Write About The Most Important Things I Know.

Writing Never Came Naturally And I Still Have To Force My Hand To Do It.

Very Early You Come To The Realization That Nothing Will Ever Take You Away From Yourself.

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.

I Started Reading Literature At 17 Or 18, And I Felt This Extra Beat To Life.

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.

Only Sometimes You Can't Feel Anything About A Subject Without Hypothesizing Its Extinction.

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.

Some People Want To Be Bank Presidents. Other People Want To Rob Banks.

Paul Ryan's Just A Really, Deeply Evil Little Creature. But He's Not Little; He's Actually Quite Tall, I'm Sorry To See. I'm Always Sorry When Really Bad Guys Are Tall.

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.

Something Will Be There When The Flood Recedes. We Know That. It Will Be Those People Now Standing In The Water, And On Those Rooftops - Many Black, Many Poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And It Will Be New Orleans - Though Its Memory May Be Shortened, Its Self-gaze And Eccentricity Scoured Out So That What's Left Is A City More Like Other Cities, Less Insular, Less Self-regarding, But Possibly More Self-knowing After Today. A City On Firmer Ground.

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.

You Can't Write ... On The Strength Of Influence. You Can Only Write A Good Story Or A Good Novel By Yourself.

Life's Passed Along To Us Empty. We Have To Make Up The Happiness Part.

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.

Obsessive Compulsive

They May Already Know Too Much About Their Mother And Father--nothing Being More Factual Than Divorce, Where So Much Has To Be Explained And Worked Through Intelligently (though They Have Tried To Stay Equable). I've Noticed This Is Often The Time When Children Begin Calling Their Parents By Their First Names, Becoming Little Ironists After Their Parents' Faults. What Could Be Lonelier For A Parent Than To Be Criticized By His Child On A First-name Basis?

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.

The World Is A More Engaging And Less Dramatic Place Than Writers Ever Give It Credit For Being

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.

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.

The Ways In Which Things Are Superficially Similar But Also Distinct Is Interesting To Me.

Most Things Don't Stay The Way They Are Very Long.

Take Nothing For Granted

Being A Slow Reader Would Normally Be A Deficiency; I Found A Way To Make It An Asset. I Began To Sound Words And See All Those Qualities - In A Way It Made Words More Precious To Me. Since So Much Of What Happens In The World Between Human Beings Has To Do With The Inconsideration Of Language, With The Imprecision Of Language, With Language Leaving Our Mouths Unmediated, One Thing Which Was Sensuous And Visceral Led To, In The Use Of Language, A Moral Gesture. It Was About Trying To Use Language To Both Exemplify And Articulate What Good Is.

I'm Trying To Cause People To Be Interested In The Particulars Of Their Lives Because I Think That's One Thing Literature Can Do For Us. It Can Say To Us: Pay Attention. Pay Closer Attention. Pay Stricter Attention To What You Say To Your Son.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Married Life Requires Shared Mystery Even When All The Facts Are Known.

Finally I Do Like Best Of All Stories Whose Necessity Is In The Implied Recognition That Someplace Out There There Exists An Urgency-a Chaos-, An Insanity, A Misrule Of Some Dire Sort Which Can End Life As We Know It But For The Fact That This Very Story Is Written, This Order Found, This Style Determined, The Worst Averted, And We Are Beneficiaries Of That Order By Being Readers

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.

It Is Right That You Have To Have A Tolerance For Solitude. But When That Solitude Bears Fruit, You Can Abandon It. You Can Be In The Company Of Others.

I Don't Have A Very Logical And Orderly Mind.

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.

America Beats On You So Hard The Whole Time. You Are Constantly Being Pummeled By Other People's Rights And Their Sense Of Patriotism.

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.

At The Exact Moment Any Decision Seems To Be Being Made, It's Usually Long After The Real Decision Was Actually Made--like Light We See Emitted From Stars.

Some Idiotic Things Are Well Worth Doing.

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.

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

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.

Love Isn’t A Thing, After All, But An Endless Series Of Single Acts.

I Wouldn't Be A Very Good Writer If Someone Hadn't Taught Me How To Read.

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 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.

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

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.

You Can't Always Go To The Well And Have Things Be Funny.

I Want Saner Gun Laws. I Think All These Automatic Weapons Should Be Banned, Big Clips And Handguns Should Be Banned. As Far As I'm Concerned, Shotguns And Hunting Weapons Are All That We Should Allow In America.

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.

If There's Another Thing That Sportswriting Teaches You, It Is That There Are No Transcendent Themes In Life. In All Cases Things Are Here And They're Over, And That Has To Be Enough.

Literature Should Not Be Exclusive, It Should Be Inclusive. My General View Is That You Can't, Based On Your Own Experience, Project What A Book Will Do For Someone Else. That's Why I Don't Review Books.

I Get Very Involved In The Internal Logic Of Sentences.

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?

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

Things Happen When People Are Not Where They Belong, And The World Moves Forward And Back By That Principle.

If Loneliness Is The Disease, The Story Is The Cure.

Maturity, As I Conceived It, Was Recognizing What Was Bad Or Peculiar In Life, Admitting It Has To Stay That Way, And Going Ahead With The Best Of Things.

She Was An Artist. She Held Opposites In Her Mind.

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.

I Have A Theory... That Someplace At The Heart Of Most Compelling Stories Is Something That Doesn't Make Sense.

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.

Marrying The Right Girl Is Even More Imperative Today Than It Was When I Was 23 Years Old Because It's So Much Harder To Get On As An Imaginative Writer Like Me Now. You Need To Have Somebody Who Believes In What You're Doing And Who Never Is Skeptical About What You're Doing. My Wife Thought It Was A Great Thing For Me To Be A Writer Because In Practical Terms It Freed Her To Do What She Wanted To Do, Which Was Work.

For, How Else To Seize Such An Instant? How To Shout Out Into The Empty Air Just The Right Words, And On Cue? Frame A Moment To Last A Lifetime?

Most Things Don't Stay The Way They Are For Very Long. I Take Nothing For Granted And Try To Be Ready For The Change That's Soon To Come.

Writing Is The Only Thing I've Ever Done With Persistence, Except For Being Married.

If Trump Was Just A Piddly-ass Little Hotel Owner Some Place, Having The Kind Of Character And Manners That He Has, He Would Not Be Worth Our Notice. But Because He's Now Been Based To This Huge Stage, Then His Dimensions Become Immense. He's Not A Tragic Figure Because He Doesn't Have The Capacity To Be Tragic. But The Consequences Of His Life And His Self Now Are Immense; They're Threatening To The World And To The Sanctity Of Human Life.

I Went To College To Study Hospitality. I Quickly Got Out Of That And Realized That What I Liked To Do Was Write.

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