Words matter. These are the best Richard Ford Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Writing is the only thing I’ve ever done with persistence, except for being married.
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.
My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I’ve never done. Also, I’m a person whom people talk to.
I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that’s just how it is.
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.
Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.
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.
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.
Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
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.
Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.
Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.
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.
Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
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.
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.
The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
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.
America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people’s rights and their sense of patriotism.
