Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.

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

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

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.

That said, being dyslexic, I wasn't a great reader when I was kid.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.