Top 117 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Ford - Page 2

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.

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

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.

The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.

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?

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

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.

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.

I want saner gun laws. I think all these automatic weapons should be banned, big clips and handguns should be banned. As far as I'm concerned, shotguns and hunting weapons are all that we should allow in America.

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?

There are more people in America that love guns and want guns for themselves and everyone else than there are not. It is also true that liberals who don't want guns are puny by and large. They're not risking anything, all they're doing is saying they don't like something. Liberals are quick to say this should happen and this should not happen, but they don't do anything about it much.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Marrying the right girl is even more imperative today than it was when I was 23 years old because it's so much harder to get on as an imaginative writer like me now. You need to have somebody who believes in what you're doing and who never is skeptical about what you're doing. My wife thought it was a great thing for me to be a writer because in practical terms it freed her to do what she wanted to do, which was work.

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

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

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.

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency-a chaos-, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers

They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?

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

Someone wanted me to write a profile for ESPN about the commissioner of baseball, and I said, "He's just some suit! Some Republican. No!" I mean if you want me to write about baseball, boxing or football, I'll write about those things because I watch them, I think about them a lot and I like them. But I don't want to write about Barry Bonds.

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

I get very involved in the internal logic of sentences.

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

I wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.

I'm not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.

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.

Paul Ryan, he is the real evil genius of the Republican party. He with his little hateful widow's peak and his smirky, snarly, simpering non-entity self, that's who I detest. Trump's just a moron, but Ryan is ugly and evil.

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

When I write a novel I start each morning by reading for 20 minutes.

I grew up in Mississippi being told it was a great place, but not feeling that. When I finally began reading seriously, literature showed me something about where I was from which was worthwhile.

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.

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.

The way in which sports focuses more on the peccadilloes, lives and putative personalities of athletes and less on the finer points of playing games, I've become less interested in it. I don't want to write sports profiles.

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.

Americans don't have saner gun laws because most Americans, including those citizens who puzzle over better angels, don't want saner gun laws.

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

To write you had to read so I backed into reading.

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.

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

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.