Richard Ford Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

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

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that's just how it is.

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.

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

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?

Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you.

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

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

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.

Marrying the right girl is even more imperative today than it was when I was 23 years old because it's so much harder to get on as an imaginative writer like me now. You need to have somebody who believes in what you're doing and who never is skeptical about what you're doing. My wife thought it was a great thing for me to be a writer because in practical terms it freed her to do what she wanted to do, which was work.

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

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

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.