Top 120 Richard Ford Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I’ve never done. Also, I’m a person whom people talk to.”

— Richard Ford

2. “Don’t let what your parents do disappoint you.”

— Richard Ford

3. “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.”

— Richard Ford

4. “Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.”

— Richard Ford

Featured in: Reading Quotes

5. “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.”

— Richard Ford

6. “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.”

— Richard Ford

7. “Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.”

— Richard Ford

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

— Richard Ford

9. “If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.”

— Richard Ford

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

10. “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.”

— Richard Ford

11. “When people realize they are being listened to, they tell you things.”

— Richard Ford

12. “I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that’s just how it is.”

— Richard Ford

13. “And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn’t be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can’t fix anyway. Telling.”

— Richard Ford

14. “One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.”

— Richard Ford

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

— Richard Ford

16. “Fear and hope are alike underneath.”

— Richard Ford

17. “Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home – when your personal clouds don’t move but hang – can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.”

— Richard Ford

18. “Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.”

— Richard Ford

19. “The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.”

— Richard Ford

20. “Only sometimes you can’t feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.”

— Richard Ford

21. “Some idiotic things are well worth doing.”

— Richard Ford

22. “You’re only good if you can do bad and decide not to.”

— Richard Ford

23. “Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren’t smart.”

— Richard Ford

24. “I knew you could know the words but not match them with the life. But to be able to do it right said something about you. And I didn’t know if my judgment was good enough, or exactly what was good or bad. Though there must be times, I thought, when there was no right thing to know, just as there were times when there was no right thing to do.”

— Richard Ford

25. “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.”

— Richard Ford

26. “I’m intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.”

— Richard Ford

27. “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.”

— Richard Ford

28. “Life’s passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.”

— Richard Ford

29. “Sometimes we do not really become adults until after 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

30. “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.”

— Richard Ford

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

— Richard Ford

32. “I’m trying to cause people to be interested in the particulars of their lives because I think that’s one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention. Pay stricter attention to what you say to your son.”

— Richard Ford

33. “For writers – even sportswriters – bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar.”

— Richard Ford

34. “The thing about being a writer is that you never have to ask, ‘Am I doing something that’s worthwhile?’ Because even if you fail at it, you know that it’s worth doing.”

— Richard Ford

35. “Men are a strange breed.”

— Richard Ford

36. “People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.”

— Richard Ford

37. “Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.”

— Richard Ford

38. “My father died in my arms. That’s tumult. That’s everything exploding.”

— Richard Ford

39. “For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?”

— Richard Ford

40. “Life is full of surprises, a wise man said, and would not be worth having if it were not.”

— Richard Ford

41. “Loneliness, I’ve read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it’s promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.”

— Richard Ford

42. “It was if we all sensed we’d be gone someday soon in a sudden instant – often it happened in the middle of the night – and didn’t want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.”

— Richard Ford

43. “At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it’s usually long after the real decision was actually made – like light we see emitted from stars.”

— Richard Ford

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

— Richard Ford

45. “And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way again.”

— Richard Ford

46. “It’s odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that’s lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they’re otherwise neither.”

— Richard Ford

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

— Richard Ford

48. “And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting. I.”

— Richard Ford

49. “It’s hard to go through life without killing someone.”

— Richard Ford

50. “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