Richard Ford
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.Collection: Book
I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.Collection: Opposites
Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.Collection: Realization
Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.Collection: Important
Americans don't have saner gun laws because most Americans, including those citizens who puzzle over better angels, don't want saner gun laws.Collection: Angel
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?Collection: Fall
I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Enough
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Gun
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.Collection: Rewards
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Gun
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Failing
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.Collection: Fun
I went to college to study hospitality. I quickly got out of that and realized that what I liked to do was write.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Son
You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.Collection: Writing
Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Believe
Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.Collection: Ignorant
You can't always go to the well and have things be funny.Collection: Wells
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.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Cutting
She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Regret
You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.Collection: Can Do
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.Collection: Tragedy
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.Collection: Leaving
Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.Collection: Smart
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.Collection: Book
I didn't read a serious book until I was 19.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Art
Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.Collection: Extinction
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?Collection: Air
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.Collection: Past
The National Rifle Association is a domestic terrorist organization that tacitly supports the killing of children more than it supports reasoned gun legislation.Collection: Children
Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Space
Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Reading
I wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.Collection: Taught
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.Collection: Flower
I get very involved in the internal logic of sentences.Collection: Logic