💬 SenQuotes.com
 Quotes

Richard Ford Quotes

American novelist and short story writer, Birth: 16-2-1944 Richard Ford Quotes
1.
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

2.
Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that
Richard Ford

3.
I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.
Richard Ford

4.
Some idiotic things are well worth doing.
Richard Ford

5.
Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. Its what your'e willing to give up.
Richard Ford

Similar Authors: Mark Twain C. S. Lewis Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Haruki Murakami Ayn Rand Charles Dickens George Eliot Albert Camus Kurt Vonnegut Ambrose Bierce Victor Hugo Chuck Palahniuk Margaret Atwood Virginia Woolf Ernest Hemingway
6.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.
Richard Ford

7.
If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
Richard Ford

8.
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

Quote Topics by Richard Ford: Writing People Thinking Reading Way Loss Gun Literature Book Stories Heart Done Past Married Long Children World Mean Believe Real Fear Remember Wells Feels Girl Order Trying Art Kind Moving
9.
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

10.
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

11.
Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.
Richard Ford

12.
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

13.
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

14.
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

15.
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.
Richard Ford

16.
Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
Richard Ford

17.
I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.
Richard Ford

18.
You can't always go to the well and have things be funny.
Richard Ford

19.
Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
Richard Ford

20.
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

21.
Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.
Richard Ford

22.
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

23.
Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
Richard Ford

24.
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

25.
With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.
Richard Ford

26.
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

27.
I didn't read a serious book until I was 19.
Richard Ford

28.
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

29.
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

30.
I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
Richard Ford

31.
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.
Richard Ford

32.
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

33.
Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.
Richard Ford

34.
I'm kind of a distractible guy.
Richard Ford

35.
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.
Richard Ford

36.
Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
Richard Ford

37.
Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.
Richard Ford

38.
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.
Richard Ford

39.
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.
Richard Ford

40.
Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.
Richard Ford

41.
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.
Richard Ford

42.
Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
Richard Ford

43.
When people realize they are being listened to, they tell you things.
Richard Ford

44.
The National Rifle Association is a domestic terrorist organization that tacitly supports the killing of children more than it supports reasoned gun legislation.
Richard Ford

45.
I went to college to study hospitality. I quickly got out of that and realized that what I liked to do was write.
Richard Ford

46.
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

47.
You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.
Richard Ford

48.
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

49.
Fear and hope are alike underneath.
Richard Ford

50.
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.
Richard Ford