Richard Ford
America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.Collection: Patriotism
Fear and hope are alike underneath.
The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.
My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.
Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
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.
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.
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.
Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.
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 work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.
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.
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.
Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.
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.
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.
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.
I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that's just how it is.
Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.
I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.
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.
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 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'm kind of a distractible guy.
I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.
Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.
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.
Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
That said, being dyslexic, I wasn't a great reader when I was kid.
Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about thatCollection: Writing
I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.Collection: Dream
When people realize they are being listened to, they tell you things.Collection: People
Some idiotic things are well worth doing.Collection: Idiotic
Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.Collection: Love Is
Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.Collection: Empty
Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. Its what your'e willing to give up.Collection: Giving Up
With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Mean
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.Collection: Ifs
The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.Collection: Pace
If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.Collection: Loneliness
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.Collection: Secret
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.Collection: Maturity
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.Collection: Believe
Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.Collection: People
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.Collection: Tolerance