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
regret lying faces
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.
interesting way
The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.
dream retirement farewell
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.
giving-up mean giving
Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. Its what your'e willing to give up.
important whats-important knows
Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.
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.
empty
Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.
ignorant alive tweet
Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.
firsts maps serials
Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.
extinction sometimes feels
Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.
enough theme cases
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.
imagination
With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.
love-is endless series
Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
rights america people
America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.