Richard Ford

Richard Ford

Novelist

Richard Ford is an acclaimed American author known for his insightful exploration of identity and human experience in novels like 'The Sportswriter.'

Writing People Thinking Way Loss Reading
Born
February 4, 1944
Quotes
105
Rank
#5883

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Richard Ford quotes (page 4 of 6)

105 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

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"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."

Memories New Orleans Self
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"To write you had to read so I backed into reading."

Reading Writing
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"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."

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

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

Interesting Way
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"Marrying the right girl is even more imperative today than it was when I was 23 years old because it's so much harder to get on as an imaginative writer like me now. You need to have somebody who believes in what you're doing and who never is skeptical about what you're doing. My wife thought it was a great thing for me to be a writer because in practical terms it freed her to do what she wanted to do, which was work."

Girl Believe Wife
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"Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you."

Past People Accountability
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"The past is the prism through which we see a great, great, great deal of ourselves; it's a useful prism. It doesn't mean that we're fascinated by the dead or that we're fascinated by things that are settled. It is just one place where we can go to understand ourselves in the present."

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

Father Arms Exploding
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"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"

Order Insanity Style
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"Even though I get a lot done with my solitude, and I make the best use of it possible, I always think solitude is an interlude in a period of time, which is populated by others."

Thinking Solitude Done
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"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."

Gun Thinking Hunting
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"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?"

Air Lasts Moments
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"There are more people in America that love guns and want guns for themselves and everyone else than there are not. It is also true that liberals who don't want guns are puny by and large. They're not risking anything, all they're doing is saying they don't like something. Liberals are quick to say this should happen and this should not happen, but they don't do anything about it much."

Gun People
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"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."

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

Writing Years Take Me
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