Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
— Richard Ford
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.
Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.
I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.
For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.
I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
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.
The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
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.
I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.
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.
That said, being dyslexic, I wasn't a great reader when I was kid.
Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.
I'm kind of a distractible guy.
If I could have married my wife and been a sports writer for the past 30 years, I wouldn't be sitting here - but I don't think I'd be sitting someplace where I was sorry to be sitting.
I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.
Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.
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.
Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.
My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.
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.
Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.
I haven't scoured Dixie out of my voice. But I don't think that the books that I have written... have really in any way been Southern in character.
The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.
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.
I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that's just how it is.
My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.
America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.
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.
Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.
Fear and hope are alike underneath.
