RICHARD FORD

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 had a Tourette's period. And obsessive compulsive disorder. Things would get in my brain that I couldn't get out of my brain.

Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.

I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.

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.

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.

Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.

The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.

I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.

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.

I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.

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.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

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'm kind of a distractible guy.

That said, being dyslexic, I wasn't a great reader when I was kid.

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 don't have a very logical and orderly mind.

Fear and hope are alike underneath.

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.

Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.