Richard Ford Quotations | Page 2

I don't want to be taken to Bhutan and smell the flowers. I want to be told something I couldn't have been told any other way.

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things.

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

I didn't read a serious book until I was 19.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

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

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.

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

Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can't, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That's why I don't review books.

To write you had to read so I backed into reading.

You can't always go to the well and have things be funny.

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

Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. Its what your'e willing to give up.

I went to college to study hospitality. I quickly got out of that and realized that what I liked to do was write.

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.

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