Richard Ford Quotes

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

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

Don't let what your parents do disappoint you.

The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.

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

I'm kind of a distractible guy.

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

To sit in the empty stands of a Florida ball park and hear the sounds of glove leather and chatter;

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

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

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

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

We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.

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

The job of the writer is to change the way the reader sees the world.

Probably many people's vision of "thinking something through" is of this nature: you do precisely what you
want to do - if you can.

First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

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

We are past the end of things now, but I don't want to leave.

Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.

Good counsel: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me
and, with these things to make a life.

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

Tony Lamas and fitted polo shirt. And that growing sense

It's hard to go through life without killing someone.

I don't look in mirrors anymore. It's cheaper than surgery.

Conversations with adults other than a person's parents had more of an outcome.

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

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

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

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

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

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

It was as if I'd already left some time before and was just catching up with myself.

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

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.

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

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

It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about.

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.

When people realize they're being listened to, they tell you things.

To encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen ...

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.

This is the only badge of true friendship I'm sure of: not to be curious.

Unbridled commerce isn't generally pretty, but it's always forward-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.

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

She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther.

Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.

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.

Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.

I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.

these were days when people still made things and used machines, instead of the opposite).

Fear and hope are alike underneath.

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,

What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed - caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present. Who

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?

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

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

That life can't be escaped and must be faced entirely.

I like writing that's smart on the page.

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

It was striking, the character of destruction. It was always diverse

It's shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible.

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

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

For writers - even sportswriters - bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar.

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

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

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.

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

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.

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings.

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

Life is full of surprises, a wise man said, and would not be worth having if it were not.

Stop searching. Face the earth where you can. Literally speaking, it's all you have to go on.

The saved moment is the true art of love.

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.

Men are a strange breed.

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

There's no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one - only plenty of wrong ways.

I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.

I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.

Something draws you ... An impatience with your own ignorance.

On writing: I don't like doing this, but it feels so good when I stop.

an infinite remoteness underlies us all.

Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.

People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.

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

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.

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.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

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.

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.

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.

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

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

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

Most things dopn't stay the way they are very long.