Richard Ford Quotes & Sayings

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. — Richard Ford

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

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. — Richard Ford

The question 'Why poetry?' isn't asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: "What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that's unutterable?" You can't generalize very usefully about poetry; you can't reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can't successfully answer the question of "Why poetry?," can't reduce it in the way I think you can't, then maybe that's the strongest evidence that poetry's doing its job; it's creating an essential need and then satisfying it. — Richard Ford

Conversations with adults other than a person's parents had more of an outcome. — Richard Ford

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

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

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

It was as if they'd discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They caught a glimpse of the person they fell in love with, and who sustained life. For some, that vision must never dim - as is true of me. But it was odd that our parents should catch their glimpse, and have frustration, anxiety and worry pass away like clouds dispersing after a storm, refind their best selves, but for that glimpse to happen just before landing our family in ruin. — Richard Ford

People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

I like writing that's smart on the page. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

Don't let what your parents do disappoint you. — Richard Ford

Such narrowly missed human connection as this can in fact be fatal, no matter who's at fault, and often results in unrecoverable free fall and a too-hasty conclusion that 'the whole goddamn thing's not worth bothering with or it wouldn't be so goddamn confusing all the goddamn time,' after which one party (or both) just wanders off and never thinks to look toward the other again. Such is the iffiness of romance. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that. — Richard Ford

Life is full of surprises, a wise man said, and would not be worth having if it were not. — Richard Ford

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

To encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen ... — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing. — Richard Ford

What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed - caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present. Who — Richard Ford

And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned
even the people who love you
and that is all right. It can be lived with. — Richard Ford

A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people
men and women alike
could go on to happier, more productive lives. — Richard Ford

Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole. — Richard Ford

She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic. — Richard Ford

And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could've been. It can be corrupting. I — Richard Ford

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

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

What's friendship's realest measure?
I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups. — Richard Ford

Unbridled commerce isn't generally pretty, but it's always forward-thinking. — Richard Ford

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

The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can't even be appraised as simply "happy", but only in terms of "Yes, I'll take it all, thanks" or "No, I believe I won't." Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life's about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me. — Richard Ford

There is no urge to touch, to kiss, to embrace. But I do it just the same. It is our last charm. Love isn't a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts. — Richard Ford

I lie back on the bed and listen to the sounds of Easter - the optimist's holiday, the holiday with the suburbs in mind, the day for all those with sunny dispositions and a staunch belief in the middle view, a tiny, tidy holiday to remember sweetly and indistinctly as the very same day through all your life. — Richard Ford

A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life. — Richard Ford

And there is no nicer time on earth than now - everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential - the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the skids and nothing within a thousand kilometers worth anticipating. This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

Possibly this is one more version of "disappearing into your life", the way career telephone company bigwigs, overdutiful parents and owners of wholesale lumber companies are said to do and never know it. You simply reach a point at which everything looks the same but nothing matters much. There's no evidence you're dead, but you act that way. — Richard Ford

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

Fear and hope are alike underneath. — Richard Ford

There's no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one - only plenty of wrong ways. — Richard Ford

Real mystery - the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book - was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away - live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else.
Explaining is where we all get into trouble. — Richard Ford

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express. — Richard Ford

Against these forces
an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving
time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance, and should. — Richard Ford

Probably many people's vision of "thinking something through" is of this nature: you do precisely what you
want to do - if you can. — 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. — Richard Ford

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

We are past the end of things now, but I don't want to leave. — Richard Ford

What I know is, you have a better chance in life-of surviving it-if you tolerate loss well;manage not to be a cynic through it all; ...
to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good,even if the good is not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try. — Richard Ford

Just exactly what that good life was
the one I expected
I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between. — Richard Ford

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? — Richard Ford

I didn't know with certainty what to say about the large world, and didn't care to risk speculating. And I still don't. That we all look at it from someplace, and in some hopeful-useful way, is about all I found I could say
my best, most honest effort. And that isn't enough for literature, though it didn't bother me much. Nowadays, I'm willing to say yes to as much as I can: yes to my town, my neighborhood, my neighbor, yes to his car, her lawn and hedge and rain gutters. Let things be the best they can be. Give us all a good night's sleep until it's over. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

I'm kind of a distractible guy. — Richard Ford

My always needn't be forever. I'm ready for the plunge, nervy as a cliff-diver. Though if down the line things go rotten we can both climb the cliffs again. Life is long. — Richard Ford

It's hard to go through life without killing someone. — Richard Ford

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

It's odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It's so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seems impossible to find among the facts. — Richard Ford

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

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

She said that it was a mistake to have made as few superficial friends as I have done in my life, and to have concentrated only on the few things I have concentrated on
her, for one. My children, for another. Sportswriting and being an ordinary citizen. This did not leave me well enough armored for the unexpected, was her opinion. She said this was because I didn't know my parents very well, had gone to a military school, and grown up in the south, which was full of betrayers and secret-keepers and untrustworthy people, which I agree is true, though I never knew any of them. — Richard Ford

The things you'll never do don't get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can't see the dim light at either end. — Richard Ford

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

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. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. — Richard Ford

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? — Richard Ford

And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn't be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can't fix anyway. Telling — Richard Ford

It's odd to imagine, of course: you pass a car on a lonely rural highway; you sit beside a man in a diner and share views with him; you wait behind a customer checking into a motel, a friendly man with a winning smile and twinkling hazel eyes, who's happy to fill you in on his life's story and wants you to like him - odd to think this man is cruising around with a loaded pistol, making up his mind about which bank he'll soon rob.' - Richard Ford, Canada — Richard Ford

It's shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible. — Richard Ford

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

Fincher was the kind of Southerner who will try to address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes every body in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to hear an update about them at every opportunity. He looks young, but still manages to act 65. — Richard Ford

Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

In their faces
plenty of them were handsome, but ruined
I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves. — Richard Ford

Towns aren't even towns anymore," Vicki said, sensing my distraction with this sad evolution, and giving me a hug around my middle. "Dallas wasn't ever one, when you get right down to it. It's just a suburb looking for a place to light. — Richard Ford

Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That no one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew. — Richard Ford

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

Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks. — Richard Ford

For writers - even sportswriters - bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar. — Richard Ford

an infinite remoteness underlies us all. — Richard Ford

(My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything
a marriage, a conversation, a government
as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.) — Richard Ford

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

don't see what this has to do with us." I say back, "Does everything have to be about you? Can you not project yourself outside yourself? Can you not take on another's life for your own benefit? — Richard Ford

Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that you sometimes can not even know about except in retrospect, when the time may seem fogged. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

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. — Richard Ford

In the three boats story, a man is floating alone in an ocean without a life jacket when a boat passes by. "Get in. I'll save you," the boatman says. "Oh, no, it's fine," the floating man answers, "I'm putting my faith in the Lord." In time, two more boats come along, and to each rescuer the man - usually me, in Wade's telling - says, "No, no, I'm putting my faith in the Lord." Eventually, and it isn't very long in coming, the man drowns. Yet when he stands up to meet his Maker at the fated spot where some rejoice but many more cower, his Maker looks sternly down and says, "You're a fool. You're assigned to hell forever. Go there now." To which the drowned man says, "But your honor, I put my faith in you. You promised to save me." "Save you!?" fearsome God shouts from misty marmoreal heights. "Save you? Save you?" God thunders. "I sent you three boats! — Richard Ford

Good counsel: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me
and, with these things to make a life. — Richard Ford

But to anyone reasonable, my life will seem more or less normal-under-the-microscope, full of contingencies and incongruities none of us escapes and which do little harm in an existence that otherwise goes unnoticed. — Richard Ford

He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they're substantial, that they're not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to. — Richard Ford