Best 105 quotes of Richard Ford on MyQuotes

Richard Ford

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    Richard Ford

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Richard Ford

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

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    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.

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    Richard Ford

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

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

    Fear and hope are alike underneath.

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    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

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

    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?

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    Richard Ford

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

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    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.

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    Richard Ford

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

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    Richard Ford

    I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

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

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    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.

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

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

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    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.

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

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

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

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

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    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?

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    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.

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

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

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    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.

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    Richard Ford

    Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.

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    Richard Ford

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

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    Richard Ford

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

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    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.

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    Richard Ford

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

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    Richard Ford

    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.

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    Richard Ford

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

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    Richard Ford

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

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    Richard Ford

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

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    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.