Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you.

Richard Ford

Categorized in : Past People Accountability

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

Richard Ford

heart writing way

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

Richard Ford

wake-up dream way

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

Richard Ford

idiotic wells

I want saner gun laws. I think all these automatic weapons should be banned, big clips and handguns should be banned. As far as I'm concerned, shotguns and hunting weapons are all that we should allow in America.

Richard Ford

hunting gun thinking

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

Richard Ford

giving-up giving mean

Being a slow reader would normally be a deficiency; I found a way to make it an asset. I began to sound words and see all those qualities - in a way it made words more precious to me. Since so much of what happens in the world between human beings has to do with the inconsideration of language, with the imprecision of language, with language leaving our mouths unmediated, one thing which was sensuous and visceral led to, in the use of language, a moral gesture. It was about trying to use language to both exemplify and articulate what good is.

Richard Ford

quality leaving trying

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

Richard Ford

series endless love-is

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

stars light real

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

loss past art

I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.

Richard Ford

theory stories heart

The way in which sports focuses more on the peccadilloes, lives and putative personalities of athletes and less on the finer points of playing games, I've become less interested in it. I don't want to write sports profiles.

Richard Ford

athlete writing sports

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

admitting maturity peculiar

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

Richard Ford

president want people

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

literature views book

Marrying the right girl is even more imperative today than it was when I was 23 years old because it's so much harder to get on as an imaginative writer like me now. You need to have somebody who believes in what you're doing and who never is skeptical about what you're doing. My wife thought it was a great thing for me to be a writer because in practical terms it freed her to do what she wanted to do, which was work.

Richard Ford

wife girl believe

It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.

Richard Ford

knowing mean believe

Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.

Richard Ford

persistence done writing

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

Richard Ford

principles people moving

Even though I get a lot done with my solitude, and I make the best use of it possible, I always think solitude is an interlude in a period of time, which is populated by others.

Richard Ford

solitude done thinking

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

Richard Ford

behavior opposites ordinary