Richard Ford Quotations

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

Now we have proof and evidence that these authorities have been used as cash cows and patronage mills by the Pataki administration,

Many borrowers will want to protect their loans - in recent weeks we have seen many redundancy announcements, and it stands to reason that borrowers may be nervous about their ability to repay loans - but it makes sense to track down the cheapest on the market.

Many years ago, when I was just an independent driver sleeping under the truck, man, when you got to stay in a Holiday Inn, that was a treat. I've cleaned quite a few parts in the bathtub of a Holiday Inn in my time. In the late '60s, we'd go on a three-month tour. You'd have to build your cars in the parking lot. If you had an engine problem or had to build a gear, you'd take it in the room, wash it in hot water and put it back together.

We can't get them all in the church. There were hundreds of people waiting outside. They come. They come from Lord knows where, rain or shine, freezing or warm.

We are aware now, over the course of the last two years, that several other nations have developed offensive information warfare units, organizations, tactics, doctrine and capability.

These arrest warrants are only a first step. If the warrants are to mean anything, governments must act now to arrest the accused.

Dear Dick, you will be missed. You served our nation with distinction and honor, ... You have left a positive mark on our government.

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

This is not what you ordered, ... This is not what the law requires.

slow, drawn-out affairs, taking an average of three years to play out.

It's time to cost these out and see what it would take to make this happen.

The consumer has been out there spending pretty aggressively for some time. I think a reasonable case can be made that we will see growth through the end of the year. There may be some moderation, but the consumer doesn't shift gears on a dime.

It was my hope that the defendant had learned that he had a responsibility to obey the law, ... It is obvious that the lesson was lost on the defendant.

I never will forget standing on top of the truck when Junior won that Texas Busch. (Earnhardt) had on his cowboy boots and jumped from the top to the bottom. He was so excited to see (Earnhardt Jr.) win. He was really, really proud of him. He'd be proud of him today.

A promise was made by the Iraqi side to provide us with further information that we have requested.

Any network traffic that is going to pose a security problem is just blocked. It's just as if the network traffic is purified before it passes on to our networks -- attacks are blocked and prevented from spreading. We just get the reports about how much. It's simple and effective, but we don't trust anything to be foolproof.

Apple has a strong desire to be a major player in the home, but they haven't played their cards yet. They have been very careful to bring together a value proposition that's consistent with everything else that they do, which is easy to use and integrated.

The highest proportion of consumers in two decades anticipate a falling unemployment rate in 2004.

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.

That song is best esteemed with which our ears are most acquainted

It's just a lot busier, basically. There's more to do as a producer. You have another responsibility or two or three.

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.

The leaders of tomorrow are shaped by the teachers of today. I am honored to be giving the keynote speech for an organization that has 50 years of experience inspiring today's early education and care providers to be innovative, thoughtful and motivating.

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

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

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I get very involved in the internal logic of sentences.

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

Fear and hope are alike underneath.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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'm kind of a distractible guy.

The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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