Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Ford
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 16
Novelist
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Never
Fail
Failing
Worth
Writer
Asks
Even
Thing
Something
Worthwhile

More quotes by Richard Ford

Image
Theres a lot to be said for doing what youre not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what youre supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.
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
The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being
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 wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.
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
Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.
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
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.
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
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.
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
With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.
Richard Ford
Image
The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
Richard Ford
Image
I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.
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 idiotic things are well worth doing.
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 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
Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that
Richard Ford