Richard Ford famous quotes

Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that
-- Richard Ford

#Writing #Heart #Way

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Book #Views #Literature

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.
-- Richard Ford

#Dream #Way #Wake Up

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Believe #Book #Different

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

#Writing #Persistence #Done

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.
-- Richard Ford

#Idiotic #Wells

Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.
-- Richard Ford

#People #President #Want

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Secret #Who We Are #Remember

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.
-- Richard Ford

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
-- Richard Ford

#Loneliness #Disease #Stories

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Space #Remember

Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.
-- Richard Ford

#Moving #People #World

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

#Facts #Mystery #Married

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
-- Richard Ford

#Opposites #Ordinary #Behavior

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Maturity #Admitting #Way

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
-- Richard Ford

#Reading #Writing

The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.
-- Richard Ford

#Pace #Pace Of Life #Dangerous

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Failing #Worthwhile

You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.
-- Richard Ford

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Son #Thinking #People

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Want #Married #Complicated

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Dream #Retirement #Farewell

At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.
-- Richard Ford

#Heart #Stories #Crafts

I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
-- Richard Ford

#Reading #Literature #Beats

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being
-- Richard Ford

#Giving #World #Credit

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Rewards #Life Is #Building

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Heart #Loss #Thinking

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Opportunity #Play #Guilty

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Memories #Self #Cities

Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
-- Richard Ford

#Love Is #Endless

I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that's just how it is.
-- Richard Ford

#Thinking

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

#Heart #Stories #Theory

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Brain #Tourettes #Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.
-- Richard Ford

#Mind #Logical

America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.
-- Richard Ford

#Rights #America #People

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

#Father #Arms #Exploding

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

#Happiness #Writing #Important

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

#Art #Children #Real

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Fear #Writing #Loss

My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.
-- Richard Ford

#Jobs #People #Empathy

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Enough #Theme #Cases

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
-- Richard Ford

#Thinking #Ideas

When people realize they are being listened to, they tell you things.
-- Richard Ford

#People #Listening #Realizing

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

#Girl #Boys #Married

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Writing #Thinking #Order

Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
-- Richard Ford

#Maps #Firsts

Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.
-- Richard Ford

#Ignorant #Alive #Tweet

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?
-- Richard Ford

#Air #Lasts #Moments

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Divorce #Feel Better #Night

Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.
-- Richard Ford

#Writing #Hands #Force

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

#Interesting #Way

The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.
-- Richard Ford

#Art #Loss #Past

I'm kind of a distractible guy.
-- Richard Ford

#Guy #Kind

Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. Its what your'e willing to give up.
-- Richard Ford

#Giving Up #Mean #Giving

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.
-- Richard Ford

#Artist #Opposites #Mind

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Believe #Mean #Years

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Summer #Morning #Moving

Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.
-- Richard Ford

#Empty

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
-- Richard Ford

#Long #Way

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.
-- Richard Ford

#Writing #Stories #Influence

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Loss #Simple #Chance

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.
-- Richard Ford

#Life #Running #Long

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Stars #Real #Light

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.
-- Richard Ford

#Cutting #Two #People

Fear and hope are alike underneath.
-- Richard Ford

#Fear

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?
-- Richard Ford

#Mother #Children #Father

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?
-- Richard Ford

#Fall #Loss #Tree

Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.
-- Richard Ford

#Important