Richard Ford

“It's odd to imagine, of course: you pass a car on a lonely rural highway; you sit beside a man in a diner and share views with him; you wait behind a customer checking into a motel, a friendly man with a winning smile and twinkling hazel eyes, who's happy to fill you in on his life's story and wants you to like him - odd to think this man is cruising around with a loaded pistol, making up his mind about which bank he'll soon rob.' - Richard Ford, Canada”

“I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.”

“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.”

“Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.”

“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.”

“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 work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.”

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

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

“I haven't scoured Dixie out of my voice. But I don't think that the books that I have written... have really in any way been Southern in character.”

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

“With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.”

“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.”

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

“It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?”

“I had a Tourette's period. And obsessive compulsive disorder. Things would get in my brain that I couldn't get out of my brain.”

“The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: “What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that’s unutterable?” You can’t generalize very usefully about poetry; you can’t reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can’t successfully answer the question of “Why poetry?,” can’t reduce it in the way I think you can’t, then maybe that’s the strongest evidence that poetry’s doing its job; it’s creating an essential need and then satisfying it.”

“Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.”

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

“Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.”