Richard Ford quotes

Richard Ford is an acclaimed American novelist and short story writer best known for his works exploring themes of modern American life. His novel "Independence Day" won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is recognized for his insightful characterization and nuanced portrayal of ordinary people. Here are 59 of his quotes:

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

Richard Ford

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

Richard Ford

One day you think you never even made a choice and then you have to make one, even a wrong one, just so you're sure you're still able. And once that's over, you can go back and be happy again with what you were before you started worrying.

Richard Ford

People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that's interesting, bub, but I'll tell you. It's romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it.

Richard Ford

What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.

Richard Ford

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

Richard Ford

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.

Richard Ford

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

Richard Ford

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.

Richard Ford

Sometimes we do not really become adults until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes.

Richard Ford

Her complexion seemed slowly to be losing its olive color, and the set of her mouth hardened as though interior shifts were taking place she herself didn't know about but which had already corrected her outlook toward the rest of the world.

Richard Ford

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

Richard Ford

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

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

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

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

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'm not worried," I said. And I wasn't, because I thought things would be fine. And even though I was wrong, it is still not so bad a way to set your mind toward the unknown just when you are coming into the face of it.

Richard Ford

In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.

Richard Ford

You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better.

Richard Ford

But when you are older, nothing you did when you were young matters at all. I know that now, though I didn't know it then. We were simply young.

Richard Ford

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.

Richard Ford