Top 120 Richard Ford Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven’t made much progress there – though I need to.”

— Richard Ford

52. “Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.”

— Richard Ford

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

— Richard Ford

54. “The persuasive power of normal life is extravagant. To accept less than life when less is not overwhelmingly upon you is – at least for some – unacceptable.”

— Richard Ford

55. “She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.”

— Richard Ford

56. “I’m a verb, Frank. Verbs don’t answer questions.”

— Richard Ford

57. “No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings.”

— Richard Ford

58. “We are past the end of things now, but I don’t want to leave.”

— Richard Ford

59. “He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they’re substantial, that they’re not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.”

— Richard Ford

60. “The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.”

— Richard Ford

61. “And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned – even the people who love you – and that is all right. It can be lived with.”

— Richard Ford

62. “And there is no nicer time on earth than now – everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential – the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the skids and nothing within a thousand kilometers worth anticipating. This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it.”

— Richard Ford

63. “Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.”

— Richard Ford

64. “I’m not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.”

— Richard Ford

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

— Richard Ford

66. “Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.”

— Richard Ford

67. “A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.”

— Richard Ford

68. “Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that.”

— Richard Ford

69. “It’s odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It’s so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seems impossible to find among the facts.”

— Richard Ford

70. “I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.”

— Richard Ford

71. “Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.”

— Richard Ford

72. “I’m not a great hoper, Wade, I guess.” We’re not walking fast. Others pass us. “I just go in for generic hopes. That good comes to me, that I do little harm and die in my sleep.”

— Richard Ford

73. “And it did seem strange to me because I was certain then what the difference was between what had happened and what hadn’t, and knew I always would be.”

— Richard Ford

74. “At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation’s instrument.”

— Richard Ford

75. “Love, Henry remembered thinking then, was a lengthy series of insignificant questions whose answers you couldn’t live without.”

— Richard Ford

76. “I don’t look in mirrors anymore. It’s cheaper than surgery.”

— Richard Ford

77. “I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history’s continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence.”

— Richard Ford

78. “The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all’s that happened and by all that could and will happen next.”

— Richard Ford

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

— Richard Ford

80. “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?”

— Richard Ford

81. “The saved moment is the true art of love.”

— Richard Ford

82. “I’m an equal opportunity reader – although I don’t much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty.”

— Richard Ford

83. “The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became – like a long proof in mathematics in which the first calculation is wrong, following which all other calculations move you further away from how things were when they made sense.”

— Richard Ford

84. “Towns aren’t even towns anymore,” Vicki said, sensing my distraction with this sad evolution, and giving me a hug around my middle. “Dallas wasn’t ever one, when you get right down to it. It’s just a suburb looking for a place to light.”

— Richard Ford

85. “What was our life like? I almost don’t remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.”

— Richard Ford

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

— Richard Ford

87. “The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.”

— Richard Ford

88. “She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther.”

— Richard Ford

89. “In the thirties, after they were married, they lived simply and only for each other and for the day. They drank some, lived on the road with my father’s salesman’s job. They had a good time and felt they had little to look back on, and didn’t look.”

— Richard Ford

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

— Richard Ford

91. “I’m kind of a distractible guy.”

— Richard Ford

92. “The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being.”

— Richard Ford

93. “This is the only badge of true friendship I’m sure of: not to be curious.”

— Richard Ford

94. “Unbridled commerce isn’t generally pretty, but it’s always forward-thinking.”

— Richard Ford

95. “My always needn’t be forever. I’m ready for the plunge, nervy as a cliff-diver. Though if down the line things go rotten we can both climb the cliffs again. Life is long.”

— Richard Ford

96. “You survived. Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?” I don’t, of course, believe this. Most things that don’t kill us right off, kill us later.”

— Richard Ford

97. “He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don’t remember him ever smiling at me that way again.”

— Richard Ford

98. “Writing is the only thing I’ve ever done with persistence, except for being married.”

— Richard Ford

99. “Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.”

— Richard Ford

100. “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.”

— Richard Ford