Top 100 Richard Ford Quotes
#1. 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
#2. All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.
Richard Ford
#3. To sit in the empty stands of a Florida ball park and hear the sounds of glove leather and chatter;
Richard Ford
#4. There's no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one - only plenty of wrong ways.
Richard Ford
#5. The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being
Richard Ford
#6.
If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
Richard Ford
#7. Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
Richard Ford
#8. It's hard to go through life without killing someone.
Richard Ford
#9. 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
#10. Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible - time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.
Richard Ford
#11. The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
Richard Ford
#12. 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
#13. One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.
Richard Ford
#14. 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
#15. Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.
Richard Ford
#16. It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant
often it happened in the middle of the night
and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.
Richard Ford
#17. 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
#18. Most things dopn't stay the way they are very long.
Richard Ford
#19. Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. Its what your'e willing to give up.
Richard Ford
#20. And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could've been. It can be corrupting. I
Richard Ford
#21. 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.
Richard Ford
#22. 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
#23. 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.
Richard Ford
#24. You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.
Richard Ford
#25. For the two of us, ours was just a version of life briefly perfected (though in a way that showed me something) and that ended.
Richard Ford
#26. Against these forces
an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving
time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance, and should.
Richard Ford
#27. The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all's that happened and by all that could and will happen next.
Richard Ford
#28. 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.
Richard Ford
#29. He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don't remember him ever smiling at me that way again.
Richard Ford
#30. 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
#31. You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.
Richard Ford
#32. If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.
Richard Ford
#33. I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
Richard Ford
#35. I do not hold to the old belief that professors like writers because they can see us fail in a grander and sillier and therefore more unequivocal way than they have. On the contrary, they like to see someone trying, giving it all up to set a permanent mark.
Richard Ford
#37. With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.
Richard Ford
#38. 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
#39. In their faces
plenty of them were handsome, but ruined
I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.
Richard Ford
#40. Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.
Richard Ford
#41. I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.
Richard Ford
#42. I have a theory ... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.
Richard Ford
#43. It's odd how our fears, the ones we didn't know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.
Richard Ford
#44. It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about.
Richard Ford
#45. She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.
Richard Ford
#46. A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.
Richard Ford
#47. Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.
Richard Ford
#48. 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.
Richard Ford
#49. Fincher was the kind of Southerner who will try to address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes every body in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to hear an update about them at every opportunity. He looks young, but still manages to act 65.
Richard Ford
#50. Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
Richard Ford
#51. It's odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It's so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seems impossible to find among the facts.
Richard Ford
#52. 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
#53. Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.
Richard Ford
#54. Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
Richard Ford
#55. And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned
even the people who love you
and that is all right. It can be lived with.
Richard Ford
#56. Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
Richard Ford
#57. At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.
Richard Ford
#58. You can't always go to the well and have things be funny.
Richard Ford
#59. 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
#60. Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.
Richard Ford
#61. these were days when people still made things and used machines, instead of the opposite).
Richard Ford
#62. Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.
Richard Ford
#63. On writing: I don't like doing this, but it feels so good when I stop.
Richard Ford
#64. There is no urge to touch, to kiss, to embrace. But I do it just the same. It is our last charm. Love isn't a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
Richard Ford
#65. Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That no one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew.
Richard Ford
#66. Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing's worth doing unless it has the potential of to fuck up your whole life
Richard Ford
#67. 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.
Richard Ford
#68. I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people
men and women alike
could go on to happier, more productive lives.
Richard Ford
#69. 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
#70. Then nothing was ever again as it had been. You don't think things like that can happen. Then you find out they both can and will. So,
Richard Ford
#72. Life is full of surprises, a wise man said, and would not be worth having if it were not.
Richard Ford
#73. I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
Richard Ford
#74. He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they're substantial, that they're not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.
Richard Ford
#75. Good counsel: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me
and, with these things to make a life.
Richard Ford
#76. The worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of new regret, just as you get a glimmer that nothing is worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.
Richard Ford
#77. My always needn't be forever. I'm ready for the plunge, nervy as a cliff-diver. Though if down the line things go rotten we can both climb the cliffs again. Life is long.
Richard Ford
#78. We are past the end of things now, but I don't want to leave.
Richard Ford
#79. All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done.
Richard Ford
#80. No matter the evidence of your life, or who you believe you are, or what you're willing to take credit for or draw your vital strength and pride from
anything at all can follow anything at all.
Richard Ford
#81. 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
#82. This is the only badge of true friendship I'm sure of: not to be curious.
Richard Ford
#83. It's odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that's lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they're otherwise neither.
Richard Ford
#84. No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings.
Richard Ford
#85. I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.
Richard Ford
#86. What's friendship's realest measure?
I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups.
Richard Ford
#87. Towns aren't even towns anymore," Vicki said, sensing my distraction with this sad evolution, and giving me a hug around my middle. "Dallas wasn't ever one, when you get right down to it. It's just a suburb looking for a place to light.
Richard Ford
#88. I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.
Richard Ford
#89. When you're young your opponent is the future; but when you're not young, your opponent's the past and everything you've done in it and the problem of getting away from it.
Richard Ford
#90. That said, being dyslexic, I wasn't a great reader when I was kid.
Richard Ford
#91. 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
#92. 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.
Richard Ford
#93. 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
#94. Probably many people's vision of "thinking something through" is of this nature: you do precisely what you
want to do - if you can.
Richard Ford
#95. He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.
Richard Ford
#96. The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.
Richard Ford
#97. Just exactly what that good life was
the one I expected
I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between.
Richard Ford
#98. My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.
Richard Ford
#99. When people realize they're being listened to, they tell you things.
Richard Ford
#100. To encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen ...
Richard Ford
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