Quotes by Richard Ford

About Richard Ford:

Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank with You as well as the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.

Richard Ford

...to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...

Richard Ford

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

Richard Ford

It was as if they'd discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They...

Richard Ford

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.

Richard Ford

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.

Richard Ford

Loneliness, I've read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it's promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to ...

Richard Ford

In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

Richard Ford

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 ve...

Richard Ford

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

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

Richard Ford

And now, while he didn't particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn't really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person--of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself-...

Richard Ford

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.

Richard Ford

The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Where...

Richard Ford

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

I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people--men and women alike--could go on to happier, more prod...

Richard Ford

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 wh...

Richard Ford

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

Richard Ford

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

Richard Ford

Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that ...

Richard Ford

Author Bio

  • NameRichard Ford
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist and short story writer
  • BornFebruary 16, 1944
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • AwardsPulitzer Prize For Fiction; ; PEN/Faulkner Award For Fiction; Guggenheim Fellowship