Richard Ford
Richard Ford
Richard Fordis an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank with You, and the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 February 1944
CityJackson, MS
CountryUnited States of America
artist opposites mind
She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.
can-do ifs
You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.
want married complicated
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.
memories new-orleans self
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.
reading literature beats
I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
thinking
I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that's just how it is.
interesting way
The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
long trying way
Most things don't stay the way they are for very long. I take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.
people listening realizing
When people realize they are being listened to, they tell you things.
enough theme cases
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.
regret lying faces
If sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.
order insanity style
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
realization
Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.
smart cynicism feels
Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.