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.

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

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

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

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

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

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

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

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

Fear and hope are alike underneath.

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

The past is the prism through which we see a great, great, great deal of ourselves; it's a useful prism. It doesn't mean that we're fascinated by the dead or that we're fascinated by things that are settled. It is just one place where we can go to understand ourselves in the present.

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

The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.

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

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.