Richard Ford Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

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.

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

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

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 had a Tourette's period. And obsessive compulsive disorder. Things would get in my brain that I couldn't get out of my brain.

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

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.

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

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.

I'm kind of a distractible guy.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The National Rifle Association is a domestic terrorist organization that tacitly supports the killing of children more than it supports reasoned gun legislation.

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

When people realize they are being listened to, they tell you things.

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

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

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

Fear and hope are alike underneath.

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?

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.

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

Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.

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.

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

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

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

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.