Richard Ford Quotes
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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.
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You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.
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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.
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Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
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Even though I get a lot done with my solitude, and I make the best use of it possible, I always think solitude is an interlude in a period of time, which is populated by others.
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I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.
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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?
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Being a slow reader would normally be a deficiency; I found a way to make it an asset. I began to sound words and see all those qualities - in a way it made words more precious to me. Since so much of what happens in the world between human beings has to do with the inconsideration of language, with the imprecision of language, with language leaving our mouths unmediated, one thing which was sensuous and visceral led to, in the use of language, a moral gesture. It was about trying to use language to both exemplify and articulate what good is.
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When people realize they are being listened to, they tell you things.
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I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
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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.
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Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.
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Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.
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Paul Ryan's just a really, deeply evil little creature. But he's not little; he's actually quite tall, I'm sorry to see. I'm always sorry when really bad guys are tall.
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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.
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If Trump was just a piddly-ass little hotel owner some place, having the kind of character and manners that he has, he would not be worth our notice. But because he's now been based to this huge stage, then his dimensions become immense. He's not a tragic figure because he doesn't have the capacity to be tragic. But the consequences of his life and his self now are immense; they're threatening to the world and to the sanctity of human life.
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I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.
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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.
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I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.
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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.
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America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.
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Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.
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Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
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Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.
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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.
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The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.
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Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
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I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
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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.
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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.
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