Quotes from Richard Ford

John Ruskin wrote that composition is the arrangement of unequal things.

Houses can have this almost authorial power over us, seeming to ruin or make perfect our lives just by persisting in one place longer than we can. (In either case it's a power worth defeating.)

What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed—caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present. Who

What they talked about and what was in the air was only the present, interrupted by the long times between Monday and Friday. These absences made their closeness to each other even more paramount, since together was where they'd always, only been.

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

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

Cuál es la medida real de la amistad? Voy a decírselo a ustedes. Es la cantidad de tiempo que uno desperdicia con las desgracias y calamidades del otro.

We don't know where any of this is going, do we?" she said, and she squeezed my hand tight again. "No," I said. And I knew that was not a bad thing at all, not for anyone, in any life. (Sweethearts, 1986)

Explaining is where we all get into trouble.

The time since last April has gone by fast, in an almost technicolor-telescopic way—much faster than I'm used to having it go—which may be Florida's great virtue, instead of the warm weather: time goes by fast in a perfectly timeless way. Not a bit like Gotham, where you seem to feel every second you are alive, but somehow miss everything else.

You could call it the one big box, outside which there isn't another box.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

What's friendship's realest measure? I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups.

People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.

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

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.

Then, what's the matter?' I wonder, in fact, how many times I have said that or something equal to it to a woman passing palely through my life. What're you thinking? What's made you so quiet? You seem suddenly different. What's the matter? Love me is what this means, of course. Or at least, second best: surrender. Or at the very least, take some time regaling me with why you won't, and maybe by the end you will.

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