Richard Ford quotes:

It's interesting to leave a place, interesting even to think about it. Leaving reminds us of what we can part with and what we can't, then offers us something new to look forward to, to dream about.

I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.

I don't hate children. My wife and I just didn't think we would be good parents, and also by the time we got married in 1968, we were pretty nose-down toward what we wanted to do, and having a child was going to be an excuse to fail.

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

I haven't scoured Dixie out of my voice. But I don't think that the books that I have written... have really in any way been Southern in character.

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.

I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.

I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.

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

Fear and hope are alike underneath.

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

I'm an equal opportunity reader - although I don't much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty.

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.

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

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

Some idiotic things are well worth doing."

Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.

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.

What I know is, you have chance in life--of surviving it--if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.

There's a lot to be said for doing what you're not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what you're 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.

If I could have married my wife and been a sports writer for the past 30 years, I wouldn't be sitting here - but I don't think I'd be sitting someplace where I was sorry to be sitting.

I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.

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

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.

America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.

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

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.

We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.

We are past the end of things now, but I don't want to leave.

Don't let what your parents do disappoint you.

My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.

She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther.

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.

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.

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.

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.

For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.

Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.

My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.

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

A reader is entitled to believe what he or she believes is consonant with the facts of the book. It is not unusual that readers take away something that is spiritually at variance from what I myself experienced. That's not to say readers make up the book they want. We all have to agree on the facts. But readers bring their histories and all sets of longings. A book will pluck the strings of those longings differently among different readers.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency-a chaos-, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers

Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that

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?

Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.

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.

I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.

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

I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.

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.

I get very involved in the internal logic of sentences.

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.

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

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.

I realized I loved you, and I didn't want to be married to somebody I didn't love. I wanted to be married to you. It isn't all that complicated.

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

I went to college to study hospitality. I quickly got out of that and realized that what I liked to do was write.

I wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.

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.

If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough.

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

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'm kind of a distractible guy.

I'm not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.

I'm trying to cause people to be interested in the particulars of their lives because I think that's one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention. Pay stricter attention to what you say to your son.

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

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.

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

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.

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

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

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.

Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.

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

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

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

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

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.

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

They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?

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

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

To write you had to read so I backed into reading.

Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

When I write a novel I start each morning by reading for 20 minutes.

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

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.

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

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

You can't always go to the well and have things be funny.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

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

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