Top 117 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Ford

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Fear and hope are alike underneath.

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.

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.

I'm kind of a distractible guy.

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

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.

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

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I don't hate children. My wife and I just didn't think we would be good parents, and also by the time we got married in 1968, we were pretty nose-down toward what we wanted to do, and having a child was going to be an excuse to fail.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.

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

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

Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Most things don't stay the way they are for very long. I take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.

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.

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.

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.

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

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

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

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

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

Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.

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.

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.

Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you.

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

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

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

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

The past is the prism through which we see a great, great, great deal of ourselves; it's a useful prism. It doesn't mean that we're fascinated by the dead or that we're fascinated by things that are settled. It is just one place where we can go to understand ourselves in the present.

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.

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

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

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.

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.