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
heart loss thinking
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.
fear writing loss
And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.
fall loss tree
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?
loss simple chance
What I know is, you have chance in life--of surviving it--if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.
art loss past
The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.
child excuse good hate married time toward wife
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.
decided experience greater larger parochial rather southern urge
I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.
believe constructs
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.
great reader
That said, being dyslexic, I wasn't a great reader when I was kid.
blueprint less life longer maybe subtle supposed
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.
leave offers reminds
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.
dixie southern
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.
beings human itself life tells
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.
colleagues hard nasty reviews work
I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.