Quote

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

Richard Ford

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Heart
Consolation
Crafts
Instrument
Instruments
Courses
Course
Story
Stories

More quotes by Richard Ford

Image
I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.
Richard Ford
Image
With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.
Richard Ford
Image
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.
Richard Ford
Image
Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.
Richard Ford
Image
Americans don't have saner gun laws because most Americans, including those citizens who puzzle over better angels, don't want saner gun laws.
Richard Ford
Image
I wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.
Richard Ford
Image
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.
Richard Ford
Image
Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.
Richard Ford
Image
America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.
Richard Ford
Image
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.
Richard Ford
Image
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.
Richard Ford
Image
Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
Richard Ford
Image
I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
Richard Ford
Image
Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.
Richard Ford
Image
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.
Richard Ford
Image
Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
Richard Ford
Image
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.
Richard Ford
Image
To write you had to read so I backed into reading.
Richard Ford
Image
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.
Richard Ford
Image
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?
Richard Ford