Richard Ford: I was slow to learn to read, went all the way through school not really reading more than the minimum, and still to this day can't read silently much faster than I can read aloud, but there were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me because when I finally did reconcile myself to how slow I was going to have to do it, then I think I came very slowly into an appreciation of all of those qualities of language and of sentences that are not just the cognitive aspects of language: the syncopations, the sounds of words, what words look like, where paragraphs break, where lines break. I mean, I wasn't so badly dyslexic that I was disabled from reading. I just had to do it really slowly, and as I did, lingering on those sentences as I had to linger, I fell heir to language's other qualities, which I think has helped me write sentences.
Richard Ford: Jeg var langsom til at lære at læse, gik hele vejen op gennem skoletiden uden egentlig at læse mere end det absolut nødvendige, og den dag i dag kan jeg stadig ikke læse indenad meget hurtigere, end jeg kan læse højt. Men for mig var der mange fordele ved at være ordblind, for da jeg endelig accepterede, hvor langsomt jeg blev nødt til at gøre det, tror jeg, at jeg meget langsomt begyndte at værdsætte alle de kvaliteter ved sproget og ved sætninger, der ikke blot er kognitive aspekter ved sproget: synkoper, ordlyde, hvordan ord ser ud, hvor tekstafsnit deles, hvor der er linjeskift. Jeg mener, jeg var ikke så svært ordblind, at jeg ikke kunne læse. Jeg blev bare nødt til at gøre det meget langsomt, og ved at gøre det, ved at dvæle ved de sætninger, jeg blev nødt til, opdagede jeg sprogets andre kvaliteter, og det tror jeg har hjulpet mig med at skrive sætninger.