Quote

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being

Richard Ford

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Place
Give
Ever
Giving
Engaging
World
Dramatic
Credit
Writers
Less

More quotes by Richard Ford

Image
The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.
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
I think that's the thing that memoir can do more than anything it does it testifies and bears witness to the existence of people whose lives, pleasures and virtues would never have been testified to without my having done it. That makes me really glad.
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
Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
Richard Ford
Image
The way in which sports focuses more on the peccadilloes, lives and putative personalities of athletes and less on the finer points of playing games, I've become less interested in it. I don't want to write sports profiles.
Richard Ford
Image
Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that.
Richard Ford
Image
I want saner gun laws. I think all these automatic weapons should be banned, big clips and handguns should be banned. As far as I'm concerned, shotguns and hunting weapons are all that we should allow in America.
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
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
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
Image
I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.
Richard Ford
Image
I went to college to study hospitality. I quickly got out of that and realized that what I liked to do was write.
Richard Ford
Image
Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home - when your personal clouds don't move but hang - can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.
Richard Ford
Image
I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.
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
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.
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
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